Free online developer tools
Generate MD5 and SHA256 hashes instantly from text input in your browser. This tool is useful for quick integrity checks, checksum comparisons, development workflows, testing, and verifying whether the same input produces the same hash output.
Hashing converts input text into a fixed-length output value. This makes hashes useful for comparisons, integrity checks, software workflows, and situations where you need a consistent fingerprint of the same input. Change even one character in the original text and the resulting hash will be different.
This hash generator is designed to run in your browser. That means the text you enter can be processed locally on your device instead of being uploaded as part of the hashing workflow. This is helpful for quick checks, development tasks, and experiments where you want fast results without sending text elsewhere.
For more detail about site usage and analytics, read our Privacy Policy.
Choose the hashing algorithm you want to use, enter your text, and click Generate Hash. The page will create the corresponding MD5 or SHA256 value instantly. You can then copy the output and compare it against another expected value if needed.
Hash outputs are deterministic for the same algorithm and the same exact input. That means identical text produces identical results, while even tiny differences such as a space, line break, or capitalization change will generate a different hash.
A hash function maps any input to a fixed-length digest — 128 bits for MD5, 256 for SHA-256 — and it is deliberately one-way. There is no key and no "decrypt" step; you cannot run the digest backwards to recover the input. The only way to find the text behind a hash is to hash candidate inputs until one matches, which is guessing, not reversing.
This is the single most common misconception, so it is worth stating plainly: hashing is not encryption. Encryption is reversible with a key and is meant to keep data confidential; hashing is irreversible and is meant to produce a stable fingerprint you can compare. When a site "reverses" an MD5, it is looking the digest up in a precomputed table of common inputs — not decrypting it.
"MD5 is broken" and "SHA-1 is broken" are true, but they are widely misread. A hash has three security properties, and only one of them fell:
For MD5, real chosen-prefix collisions are cheap today — the Flame malware used one to forge a Windows code-signing certificate. For SHA-1, the 2017 SHAttered result produced an actual collision and the 2020 "SHA-1 is a Shambles" work made chosen-prefix collisions affordable. But there is still no practical preimage attack on either: you cannot take an arbitrary MD5 digest and compute a matching input. So the correct takeaway is precise — never use MD5 or SHA-1 where an attacker could benefit from two inputs colliding (signatures, certificates, dedup keys), but the digest of a secret input is not something they can simply invert.
This is the mistake that leaks entire databases. SHA-256 and MD5 are fast — a commodity GPU computes billions of them per second — and speed is exactly what an attacker wants. When a password table stored as unsalted SHA-256 leaks, an offline cracking rig burns through the common-password space almost instantly. The hash being "strong" does not help; its speed is the vulnerability.
Use a purpose-built password hash: bcrypt, scrypt, or Argon2. These are deliberately slow and memory-hard, with a tunable work factor, so each guess costs the attacker real time and money. Always pair them with a unique per-user salt, which is what defeats precomputed rainbow tables and ensures two users with the same password get different stored hashes. A plain SHA-256 with a salt is still far too fast — the salt stops precomputation, but not a targeted GPU attack.
None of this makes SHA-256 a bad hash — it is an excellent one for the jobs it was designed for, all of which rely on the collision resistance it still has:
The dividing line is simple: SHA-256 is the right tool when you need a stable fingerprint of data, and the wrong tool when you need to store a secret that humans chose.
No. Hashing is one-way and keyless, so there is nothing to decrypt. The only way to find the input behind a digest is to hash candidate inputs until one matches — which works only for guessable inputs like common passwords, not for arbitrary data.
Their collision resistance is broken, so never use them where an attacker benefits from two inputs sharing a hash — digital signatures, certificates, or deduplication keys. Their preimage resistance still holds, so a legacy MD5 checksum for detecting accidental corruption is not an immediate emergency, but new designs should use SHA-256.
No. SHA-256 is far too fast, which makes offline cracking cheap once a database leaks. Use bcrypt, scrypt, or Argon2 with a unique per-user salt. Those are intentionally slow and memory-hard, so each guess costs the attacker meaningful time.
A rainbow table is a precomputed map from common inputs to their hashes, so an unsalted digest can be looked up instantly. A unique random salt mixed into each password means the attacker would need a separate table per salt, which is infeasible — and it makes identical passwords hash to different values.
Determinism is the point: it is what lets you compare and verify. It only becomes a weakness for passwords, where it enables precomputation — which is exactly why password hashing adds a per-user salt to break the "same input, same output" property.
It generates MD5 and SHA-256 digests from text input in your browser, so your text stays on your device. It does not hash uploaded files; for a file checksum use a dedicated file-hashing tool or your operating system's built-in utility.