# rapidfuzz/RapidFuzz

Rapid fuzzy string matching in Python using various string metrics

Repository: https://github.com/rapidfuzz/RapidFuzz
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/rapidfuzz
Homepage: https://rapidfuzz.github.io/RapidFuzz/
Language: Python
License: MIT
License Family: permissive
Topics: string-matching, string-similarity, string-comparison, levenshtein, python, cpp, levenshtein-distance
Last push: 2026-08-10T09:22:59+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 87/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 97, release rhythm 66, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 2377, "days_push": 23, "days_rel": 148, "gap_med": 31.0, "n_releases_24m": 13}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 4085, forks 168 (observed 2026-08-28T04:08:34.488741+00:00)

## What it is
RapidFuzz is a fast fuzzy string matching library for Python and C++ offering many string metrics such as Levenshtein, Jaro-Winkler, and Hamming distances. It is MIT-licensed, largely a drop-in replacement for FuzzyWuzzy, and achieves high performance through optimized C++ implementations with a pure Python fallback.

## Use cases
- fuzzy match user input against a list of known strings
- compute Levenshtein distance between two strings in Python
- deduplicate messy product names in a dataset
- find best matching city name from misspelled user queries
- replace fuzzywuzzy with a faster MIT-licensed alternative
- score string similarity with jaro-winkler or hamming metrics

## When to choose
- you need fast, accurate fuzzy string matching in Python or C++
- you want an MIT-licensed drop-in replacement for fuzzywuzzy/thefuzz
- you need many string metrics beyond basic Levenshtein
- you must run on platforms where C extensions cannot be compiled

## When to avoid
- you need full-text semantic search or embeddings-based similarity rather than edit-distance metrics
- you need a search engine with indexing and ranking over large corpora
- your project is not in Python or C++

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: stable
- function: nlp, search-engine, developer-tools
- domain: developer-tools
- platform: python, cpp, cross-platform
- tags: string-matching, fuzzy-matching, levenshtein-distance, string-similarity, fuzzywuzzy-replacement, natural-language-processing, algorithms

## Member repositories
- rapidfuzz/RapidFuzz (main) score 87

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:34.488741+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:23:24.119274+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/rapidfuzz/RapidFuzz (fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:34.488741+00:00, sha ef19aff35452)
  - homepage: https://rapidfuzz.github.io/RapidFuzz/ (fetched 2026-08-29T09:15:14.189476+00:00, sha 5527d95e9f50)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.