Abstract Red swamp crayfish is an important model organism for research of the invertebrate innate immunity mechanism. Its excellent disease resistance against bacteria, fungi, and viruses is well-known. However, the antiviral mechanisms of crayfish remain unclear. In this study, we obtained high-quality sequence reads from normal and white spot syndrome virus (WSSV)-challenged crayfish gills. For group normal (GN), 39,390,280 high-quality clean reads were randomly assembled to produce 172,591 contigs; whereas, 34,011,488 high-quality clean reads were randomly assembled to produce 182,176 contigs for group WSSV-challenged (GW). After GO annotations analysis, a total of 35,539 (90.01%), 14,931 (37.82%), 28,221 (71.48%), 25,290 (64.05%), 15,595 (39.50%), and 13,848 (35.07%) unigenes had significant matches with sequences in the Nr, Nt, Swiss-Prot, KEGG, COG and GO databases, respectively. Through the comparative analysis between GN and GW, 12,868 genes were identified as differentially up-regulated DEGs, and 9,194 genes were identified as differentially down-regulated DEGs. Ultimately, these DEGs were mapped into different signaling pathways, including three important signaling pathways related to innate immunity responses. These results could provide new insights into crayfish antiviral immunity mechanism.