Which algorithm should I use?

SHA-256 unless something forces your hand. It is fast, universally supported and has no known weaknesses. Reach for SHA-512 when a specification asks for it, and treat MD5 or SHA-1 as read-only — fine for checking against an old published checksum, wrong for anything new.

Can a hash be reversed to get my text back?

Not by inverting it — the function discards information deliberately. Short or common inputs are a different matter, because an attacker can simply hash every candidate and compare. A hashed six-digit PIN offers no protection at all, since there are only a million of them.

Why do two tools give me different digests for the same text?

Nearly always a trailing newline, or a different character encoding. A file ending in a line break hashes differently from one that does not, and text pasted from a document may carry a byte-order mark you cannot see. The Unicode inspector on this site will show you what is really there.

Is my text sent anywhere to be hashed?

No. Digest computation happens in this tab, which is why you can hash a password, an API key or a customer record here without it being transmitted. There is no request to inspect and no log to end up in.

Hash Generator

SHA-256, SHA-1, SHA-512, MD5 and CRC32 from any text.

Everything runs inside your browser. Your files never leave your device.

Input

Result

The result appears here as you type.

Ask about Hash Generator

Questions about what this tool does, which option to pick, or what it can and cannot handle.

The question you type here is sent to an AI provider to be answered — your files and whatever you put in the tool above are not, and the assistant cannot see them. Answers are generated and can be wrong. The tool itself is not guessing: it runs deterministic code on your device.

About the Hash Generator

A hash is a fingerprint of some data: run the same input through and you always get the same output, change one character and the output changes completely. That property makes hashes useful for two everyday jobs — checking that a download arrived intact, and checking that two things are identical without comparing them byte by byte.

This tool computes SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, SHA-1, MD5 and CRC32 from whatever text you paste, and by default shows all of them at once so you can match whichever one a vendor happened to publish. The SHA family comes from your browser's own cryptography engine. MD5 and CRC32 are implemented here directly, because browsers deliberately refuse to provide MD5 and CRC32 is not a cryptographic function at all.

Two of those algorithms are on the list only for compatibility, and the tool says so beneath the result. MD5 and SHA-1 are both broken in the sense that matters: it is practical to construct two different inputs with the same digest. That makes them unsafe for signatures, for password storage and for anything where an adversary chooses the input. It does not make them useless for verifying an accidental corruption against a checksum a project published in 2009, which is exactly why they remain here.

CRC32 belongs to a different category again. It is an error-detecting code, not a hash — designed to catch the kinds of damage a noisy transmission causes, trivially forgeable by anyone who wants to. Use it to confirm a file survived a copy, never to confirm a file is the one you expected.

Finally, none of these are password hashes. Hashing a password with SHA-256 gives an attacker with a stolen database billions of guesses per second. Passwords need a deliberately slow function such as bcrypt, scrypt or Argon2, whose entire purpose is to be expensive.

How to use it

1Paste or type the text you want fingerprinted into the input.
2Leave the algorithm on “Show them all” to compare against whichever digest a vendor published, or pick one to get a single line.
3Switch the output between hexadecimal and Base64 depending on what you are comparing against.
4Copy the digest and compare it with the published value — character by character, or by pasting both into the text diff tool.

Questions

Which algorithm should I use?: SHA-256 unless something forces your hand. It is fast, universally supported and has no known weaknesses. Reach for SHA-512 when a specification asks for it, and treat MD5 or SHA-1 as read-only — fine for checking against an old published checksum, wrong for anything new.
Can a hash be reversed to get my text back?: Not by inverting it — the function discards information deliberately. Short or common inputs are a different matter, because an attacker can simply hash every candidate and compare. A hashed six-digit PIN offers no protection at all, since there are only a million of them.
Why do two tools give me different digests for the same text?: Nearly always a trailing newline, or a different character encoding. A file ending in a line break hashes differently from one that does not, and text pasted from a document may carry a byte-order mark you cannot see. The Unicode inspector on this site will show you what is really there.
Is my text sent anywhere to be hashed?: No. Digest computation happens in this tab, which is why you can hash a password, an API key or a customer record here without it being transmitted. There is no request to inspect and no log to end up in.