gzip
Ranked 3 of 14 compression tools by recommenders
Fast, universally supported and good enough, people reach for it when speed and compatibility matter more than ratio; critics say zstd compresses better.
Fast, universally supported and good enough, people reach for it when speed and compatibility matter more than ratio; critics say zstd compresses better.
36 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 23
- criticize it
- 13
- approval share
- 64%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 23 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Universally supported and widely used
“I ended up using gzip because it's best supported by the software I use”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” “very fast, universally supported , and good enough”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker” “a more widespread compression algorithm”
Comment from 22 Jan 2026 in “ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss” Fast and simple to implement
“very fast, universally supported , and good enough”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker” “very fast and super simple to implement”
Comment from 22 Sep 2026 in “Can gzip be a language model?” “Gzip is good enough and much faster.”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” Better when speed matters most
“Even the ancient gzip is preferable in certain cases, when speed is more important than compression ratio”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” “If I want higher compatibility and fast speeds, I'd probably just reach for gzip.”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” “gzip and parallel gzip are just better if speed is more important”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker” Low memory footprint
“DEFLATE's simplicity and tiny memory footprint (~32KB window) make it hard to kill in constrained or streaming contexts.”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” “its low memory requirements (~32 KB per stream)”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
zstd compresses better
“Compression ratio is better than gzip but worse than zstd, compression/decompression speed better than zstd but worse than gzip”
Comment from 18 Sep 2026 in “Hister: A private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep” “swapping out gzip for other compression schemes -- usually zstd”
Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora” “gzip and friends have worse ratios again”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” Hard to read metadata
“It's a little odd that gzip itself won't display (or sometimes even write) these values”
Comment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Gzpeek: Tool to Parse Gzip Metadata” “gzip has something similar but you have to do some hacky thing to get at it”
Comment from 11 Feb 2026 in “Text classification with Python 3.14's ZSTD module” Outdated for modern use
“The OCI users that I have seen are using gzip due to inertia”
Comment from 24 Dec 2025 in “A faster path to container images in Bazel” “.zip and .gz no longer need to be used here in 2026.”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker” “Neither has been good enough for years.”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip”
Other compression tools people recommend
The four most recommended other compression tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zstandard (zstd) | 111 | 14 | 89% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Brotli | 24 | 18 | 57% | 7 | — | — |
| gzipThis page | 23 | 13 | 64% | 8 | — | — |
| tar | 19 | 13 | 59% | 11 | — | — |
| NNCP | 15 | 0 | 100% | 11 | — | Approved |
What people said
37 of the 41 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“and of course we still have to expose gzip to attack as well.”
“same payload repeated with a gap”
“very fast and super simple to implement”
“Compression ratio is better than gzip but worse than zstd, compression/decompression speed better than zstd but worse than gzip”
“I ended up using gzip because it's best supported by the software I use”
“swapping out gzip for other compression schemes -- usually zstd”
“improvements like SSL/TLS, ssh, gzip, bzip2, lz4, Linux, etc. and so many other worthwhile innovations”
“the Go stdlib insists on extraneous padding that breaks the backwards compatibility requirements of my program”
“very fast, universally supported , and good enough”
“gzip and parallel gzip are just better if speed is more important”
“.zip and .gz no longer need to be used here in 2026.”
“32kB is _really_ tiny in comparison”
“I (almost) always end up coming back to gzip”
“gzip via compression streams were pretty slow and not great compression”
“we still just gzip everywhere”
“I have chosen to use lrzip+gzip for certain very large files”
“I use quite frequently gzip (executed after lrzip preprocessing) for some very large files, where it provides better compression at a given execution time”
“Even the ancient gzip is preferable in certain cases, when speed is more important than compression ratio”
“which therefore is not Pareto optimal”
“gzip and friends have worse ratios again”
“DEFLATE's simplicity and tiny memory footprint (~32KB window) make it hard to kill in constrained or streaming contexts.”
“concatening gzipped files just works out of the box”
“Neither has been good enough for years.”
“GZIP it's like the ZIP of free formats modulo packaging”
“It’s handy because it is very easy to just append stuff at the end of a compressed file”
“its low memory requirements (~32 KB per stream)”
“gzip should only be reached for as a compatibility option, that’s the only place it wins”
“If I want higher compatibility and fast speeds, I'd probably just reach for gzip.”
“very strong point (and smarter implementation in programs) for gzip”
“Gzip is good enough and much faster.”
“gzip doesn't support random access”
“It's a little odd that gzip itself won't display (or sometimes even write) these values”
“gzip has something similar but you have to do some hacky thing to get at it”
“a more widespread compression algorithm”
“For lossless compression of generic data, gzip or zstd.”
“The OCI users that I have seen are using gzip due to inertia”
“how most of the time all that text data (html, js and css too!) you're sending over the wire will be automatically compressed”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.