How to use the SHA-256 Hash Generator
- Type or paste your text — SHA-256 and the other hashes update as you type.
- Turn on HMAC and enter a secret key to create an HMAC-SHA256 signature.
- Copy the hash, or paste an expected hash in the compare box to verify it.
What is SHA-256?
SHA-256 is part of the SHA-2 family designed by the NSA and standardised by NIST. It produces a 256-bit hash — 64 hex characters — and no practical collision has ever been found. It secures TLS certificates, Git object IDs (in SHA-256 repositories), software downloads, Bitcoin and countless APIs.
HMAC-SHA256 for webhooks and APIs
An HMAC combines a secret key with the message, so only someone with the key can produce the same signature. Stripe, GitHub, Shopify and many other services sign webhooks with HMAC-SHA256: compute it over the raw request body with your signing secret and compare it with the signature header. Turn on HMAC above to do exactly that.
SHA-256 is not for passwords on its own
SHA-256 is fast by design — great for checksums, bad for passwords, because attackers can try billions of guesses per second. Store passwords with a deliberately slow algorithm such as bcrypt, scrypt or Argon2.
Tools that pair well with the SHA-256 Hash Generator
- MD5 Hash Generator — Type or paste text to get its MD5 hash as you type — the 32-character hex fingerprint used for checksums, cache keys and legacy systems — with SHA-256 alongside for anything security-related.
- JWT Encoder — Build a JWT for testing APIs: edit the payload, add standard claims with one click and sign it with an HMAC secret or an RSA / EC private key.
- JWT Decoder — Paste a JSON Web Token to inspect its header and payload, check when it expires and verify its signature.
- Htpasswd Generator — Generate user:hash lines for HTTP Basic Authentication in Apache, Nginx, Traefik and Caddy — with bcrypt by default and nothing sent to a server.