The best compression tools, according to hackers
14 compression tools recommended in Hacker News comments over the past year, ranked by how many separate people recommend each one.
All compression tools
- Zstandard (zstd)A go-to general-purpose compressor with an excellent size-versus-speed tradeoff and very fast decompression, though Brotli and others can beat it on density for some files.111recommend
- BrotliGoogle-maintained compression library whose built-in dictionary suits HTML, CSS, JS and JSON, often beating gzip on size. Critics say it is slower than zstd and has had security problems.24recommend
- gzipFast, universally supported and good enough, people reach for it when speed and compatibility matter more than ratio; critics say zstd compresses better.23recommend
- tarFree archiver standard on nearly every Unix-like system, reliable for copying and backing up files. Main caveat: options and behaviour differ between GNU, BSD and macOS versions.19recommend
- NNCPNeural-net compressor by Fabrice Bellard that tops the Large Text Compression Benchmark and works well for offline, store-and-forward transfer. Caveat: compression is extremely slow.15recommend
- xzFree, widely available compression tool that people find gives good compression ratios and reproducible builds; critics point to a past backdoored release and slow speed.14recommend
- bzip3Recommended for strong compression on some data, such as Wikipedia XML dumps, and speed in some tests. Critics say decompression is slow and memory-heavy and it often trails zstd.12recommend
- lz4People recommend lz4 for fast compression and decompression, and it is a common pick among general-purpose compressors. One commenter found its decompression slower than misa77 and zxc.10recommend
- TS ZipExperimental compressor by Fabrice Bellard that people say beats xz and top enwik8 entries on English text. Critics say it is very slow and not for production.9recommend
- bzip2People recommend it for files compressed once and decompressed often where size matters. Common caveat: it is slow, and zstd beats it on speed.9recommend
- misa77Compression codec that decompresses faster than LZ4 at comparable or better ratios. Critics note slow compression and no robustness to corrupted data.8recommend
- zlibFree compression library people pick because it is built into most platforms and standard libraries. Caveat: it approaches a sequence's entropy slowly.6recommend
- OpenZLGives high compression ratios at high speed for data whose structure you know. Main caveat: it requires knowing that structure and works only inside your own program.6recommend
- RarsFree open-source Rust implementation of RAR, valued as the broadest open source option. Caveat: slow in edge cases and likely has bugs.6recommend