lz4
Hacker ApprovedRanked 8 of 14 compression tools by recommenders
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.
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.
10 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 10
- criticize it
- 0
- approval share
- 100%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 10 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- Nobody criticizes itNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 6 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
Speeds up data handling
“lz4 can still be the right choice when decompression speed matters.”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” “lz4 will probably make things quicker”
Comment from 18 Jan 2026 in “Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)” Common among general-purpose compressors
“improvements like SSL/TLS, ssh, gzip, bzip2, lz4, Linux, etc. and so many other worthwhile innovations”
Comment from 9 Jun 2026 in “I'm building a parallel internet, and it's called The Thinnernet” “Otherwise, if zstd is easy to add, IMO I would always prefer, zstd, lz4 or brotli.”
Comment from 7 Sep 2026 in “bzip3” “occasionally lz4 or bz2 or brotli”
Comment from 2 Sep 2026 in “We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Slower decompression than misa77 and zxc
“lz4's decompression speed was far slower than misa77 and zxc”
Comment from 15 Jul 2026 in “Show HN: misa77 - a codec that decodes 2x faster than LZ4 (at better ratios)”
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 | — | — |
| gzip | 23 | 13 | 64% | 8 | — | — |
| tar | 19 | 13 | 59% | 11 | — | — |
| lz4This page | 10 | 0 | 100% | 6 | — | Approved |
What people said
8 of the 10 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Otherwise, if zstd is easy to add, IMO I would always prefer, zstd, lz4 or brotli.”
“occasionally lz4 or bz2 or brotli”
“lz4's decompression speed was far slower than misa77 and zxc”
“I've had a lot of success just LZ4ing a bitmap.”
“improvements like SSL/TLS, ssh, gzip, bzip2, lz4, Linux, etc. and so many other worthwhile innovations”
“Some things that Meta shares or opensources is discrete but amazing.”
“lz4 can still be the right choice when decompression speed matters.”
“lz4 will probably make things quicker”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.