# libsodium

10 Hacker News commenters recommended libsodium and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Developers recommend it for solid cryptography primitives with one blessed algorithm each; the common caveat is that its primitives don't always fit the need.

## Why people recommend it

- Tight, solid crypto API design (2 comments): "Ristretto is a tightly designed API that allows me to build arbitrary polynomials on Curve25519" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436921)) "I trust that libsodium's X25519 is implemented pretty solidly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48784457))

## What people warn about

- Implementations differ across libraries (1 comments): "Did you also check all of the libraries that implement the check differently to libsodium?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46443364))
- Not helpful for many OpenSSL uses (1 comments): "This is generally not helpful for the kinds of things that people use OpenSSL for." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46634823))
- Primitives not always what's needed (1 comments): "Still great, but the primitives it provides aren't necessarily the ones you need." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632789))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [BLAKE3](https://hackerapproved.com/p/blake3.md): 16 recommend
- [AWS-LC](https://hackerapproved.com/p/aws-lc.md): 10 recommend
- [xxhash](https://hackerapproved.com/p/xxhash.md): 9 recommend
- [pyca/cryptography](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pyca-cryptography.md): 8 recommend
- [BoringSSL](https://hackerapproved.com/p/boringssl.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "libsodium", https://hackerapproved.com/p/libsodium/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).