OpenZL
Shares rank 12 of 14 compression tools by recommenders
Gives 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.
Gives 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.
7 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 86%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not 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
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not 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
High compression ratios at high speed
“OpenZL delivers high compression ratios while preserving high speed, a level of performance that is out of reach for generic compressors.”
Comment from 27 Jun 2026 in “Hellishly Slow Level 13 Deflate Compression” Considerably better than alternatives
“It really is considerably better, but I wonder how many people will do it”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” Seen as cooler than alternatives
“Honestly, Openzl looks even cooler!”
Comment from 2 Mar 2026 in “Have your cake and decompress it too”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Requires knowing data structure
“it requires that you know the structure of your data, and don't care about inspecting that data outside of your program”
Comment from 27 Jun 2026 in “Hellishly Slow Level 13 Deflate Compression” Doubts about how many will adopt
“It really is considerably better, but I wonder how many people will do it”
Comment from 15 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 | — | — |
| gzip | 23 | 13 | 64% | 8 | — | — |
| tar | 19 | 13 | 59% | 11 | — | — |
| OpenZLThis page | 6 | 1 | 86% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
5 of the 7 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Spend orders of magnitude (literally) more on compute to run the LLM on the data than any compression algorithm would ever take.”
“it requires that you know the structure of your data, and don't care about inspecting that data outside of your program”
“OpenZL delivers high compression ratios while preserving high speed, a level of performance that is out of reach for generic compressors.”
“It really is considerably better, but I wonder how many people will do it”
“Honestly, Openzl looks even cooler!”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.