Base64, Hex, and Base32 all do the same basic job: represent arbitrary binary data using only printable text characters, so it can travel safely through systems — email, URLs, JSON, config files — that weren't built to carry raw bytes. None of them provide any confidentiality; they're encodings, not encryption, and anyone can decode them with no key required. The difference between them is purely about size, alphabet, and where each is conventionally expected.
Hexadecimal maps each byte to exactly two characters from the alphabet 0-9a-f, so the encoded output is always exactly double the size of the input. It's the least space-efficient of the three, but its simplicity — one byte in, two predictable characters out — makes it the natural choice for things humans need to read or manually compare: hash digests (SHA-256, MD5), color codes, memory addresses, and byte-level debugging.
Base64 packs 3 bytes of input into 4 output characters using a 64-character alphabet (A-Za-z0-9+/, with = padding), for roughly a 33% size increase — much more efficient than hex. That efficiency, plus near-universal library support, is why Base64 is the default for embedding binary data in text formats: image data URIs, JWT segments, email attachments (MIME), and API payloads that need to carry binary content inside JSON.
Base32 uses a smaller, 32-character alphabet (typically A-Z2-7) at the cost of being about 60% larger than the original data — worse than Base64, but with a specific advantage: its alphabet avoids characters that are ambiguous when spoken aloud, hand-typed, or mixed up between upper and lower case (no 0/O or 1/Iconfusion). That's why it shows up in places meant for human transcription — TOTP secret keys (the codes you type in when setting up two-factor authentication), and some URL-shortener or filesystem-safe identifiers.
You can convert between all of these with the Encrypt / Decrypttool's Base64 and Hex encode/decode modes, entirely client-side.