# lz4

10 Hacker News commenters recommended lz4 and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People 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.

## Why people recommend it

- Speeds up data handling (2 comments): "lz4 can still be the right choice when decompression speed matters." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47379703)) "lz4 will probably make things quicker" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672841))
- Common among general-purpose compressors (3 comments): "improvements like SSL/TLS, ssh, gzip, bzip2, lz4, Linux, etc. and so many other worthwhile innovations" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48466775)) "Otherwise, if zstd is easy to add, IMO I would always prefer, zstd, lz4 or brotli." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49602367)) "occasionally lz4 or bz2 or brotli" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49543708))

## What people warn about

- Slower decompression than misa77 and zxc (1 comments): "lz4's decompression speed was far slower than misa77 and zxc" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48924921))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Zstandard (zstd)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zstd.md): 111 recommend
- [Brotli](https://hackerapproved.com/p/brotli.md): 24 recommend
- [gzip](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gzip.md): 23 recommend
- [tar](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tar.md): 19 recommend
- [NNCP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nncp.md): 15 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "lz4", https://hackerapproved.com/p/lz4/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).