Computes every common hash at once, from typed text or a dropped file. Showing them all together is deliberate: you usually have a checksum to compare against and do not know which algorithm produced it, and its length tells you immediately.
Identifying a checksum by its length
8 hex characters — CRC32. Not a hash at all, an error-detecting code. Used inside ZIP and PNG.
32 — MD5. Broken for security since 2004 but still ubiquitous for file integrity.
40 — SHA-1. Broken for collisions since 2017. Git uses it, though not for security.
64 — SHA-256. The current default for essentially everything.
96 — SHA-384. 128 — SHA-512.
Verifying a download
Note what this proves and what it does not. A matching checksum proves the bytes match what the publisher's page said. It does not prove the publisher's page was not itself tampered with. For that you need a signature, not a hash.
Do not use these to store passwords
Why MD5 is still here
Other names for this
Also searched as “md5 generator”, “sha256 generator”, “checksum calculator”, “sha1 hash”.
Questions
- Which algorithm should I use?
- SHA-256 unless something specific requires otherwise. Use MD5 or CRC32 only to check for accidental corruption, never against an adversary.
- Can I hash a large file?
- Yes. Files are read in chunks, so multi-gigabyte files work without exhausting memory.
- Why do I get a different hash for the same text?
- Almost always a trailing newline, or CRLF versus LF line endings. Hashes are exact — one byte of difference changes everything.
- Can it reverse a hash?
- No, and nothing can. Hashing is one-way. Services that claim to "decrypt MD5" are looking the value up in a table of pre-computed common inputs.
- Does my text leave the browser?
- No. Everything runs as JavaScript in this tab — there is no server involved and no request is made. Open the Network panel and watch, or turn your Wi-Fi off and keep using the tool.