Best of / Rust crates / hashing and checksums
Best of · ranked by real use · data Oct 24, 2026
Best Rust crates for hashing and checksums
Short answerBy real use, the top Rust crates for hashing and checksums are sha2 (3.5M a day), foldhash (3M a day), crc32fast (2.2M a day). sha2 is our default pick: 3,510,276 real downloads a day and 22,608 dependents. Gaining fastest against the field: xxhash-rust (+18%). 6 of these 11 shipped in the last 90 days; fxhash has not released in 2+ years.
Our picks
- Default pick: sha2. The most used that still ships releases, so the most answered questions and the likeliest to already be in your tree.
- Rising: xxhash-rust. +18% on quiet days against the field over 90 days.
- Most recently released: crc32fast (4 days ago).
The ranking
| # | Crate | Real downloads a day | Dependents | Trend vs field | Last release | What it is (its own description) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | sha2 Foundational | 3,510,276 | 22,608 | +5% | 12d | Pure Rust implementation of the SHA-2 hash function family including SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 |
| 2 | foldhash Established | 3,043,165 | 333 | +6% | 14mo | A fast, non-cryptographic, minimally DoS-resistant hashing algorithm |
| 3 | crc32fast Widely used | 2,229,287 | 1,440 | +6% | 4d | Fast, SIMD-accelerated CRC32 (IEEE) checksum computation |
| 4 | sha1 Widely used | 2,004,209 | 2,496 | +8% | 3mo | SHA-1 hash function |
| 5 | ahash Widely used | 1,968,676 | 2,097 | -7% | 18mo | A non-cryptographic hash function using AES-NI for high performance |
| 6 | siphasher Established | 1,957,258 | 274 | +6% | 29d | SipHash-2-4 and SipHash-1-3 keyed hash functions in pure Rust, with 64-bit and 128-bit output and no_std support |
| 7 | md-5 Widely used | 1,344,840 | 1,435 | +7% | 7mo | MD5 hash function |
| 8 | twox-hash Established | 763,473 | 394 | +0% | 20d | A Rust implementation of the XXHash and XXH3 algorithms |
| 9 | blake3 Widely used | 617,260 | 4,136 | +5% | 2mo | the BLAKE3 hash function |
| 10 | xxhash-rust Widely used | 425,794 | 1,000 | +18% | 26d | Implementation of xxhash |
| 11 | fxhash Established quiet 2+ years | 325,803 | 568 | -17% | 9.2y | A fast, non-secure, hashing algorithm derived from an internal hasher used in FireFox and Rustc |
Rules
Candidates: crates whose own README says they do this job, picked by hand (sha2, blake3, md-5, sha1, crc32fast, xxhash-rust, twox-hash, ahash, foldhash, fxhash, siphasher); one appears when we have 80+ days of crates.io data for it. Ranked by real downloads a day (quiet-day median, release-day spikes removed), crates.io data Oct 24, 2026. The default pick is the top crate that shipped a release in the last 2 years. Downloads measure use, not quality, and crates that other libraries pull in rank above tools you add yourself: read each description for fit.
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