# Zstandard (zstd) 111 Hacker News commenters recommended Zstandard (zstd) and 14 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** 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. ## Why people recommend it - Excellent ratio-to-speed tradeoff (6 comments): "zstd might lose out there, the answer seems to vary based on the tests I look at, but it seems to be better across a very wide range" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727072)) "they're considered to have better tradeoffs in teems of collision compression time and overall space saved by compression" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47379151)) "all that "more" has been ridiculously more optimized in zstd and other modern compression methods" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49599245)) - Very fast decompression (5 comments): "While it might not compress as small, it decompresses way faster, and might make up for the few extra bytes sent." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47453235)) "Huge assets took less hard drive space, took less time to download, and took less time to decompress." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49543708)) "competitive with Brotli, which is impressive given how much faster it is to decompress" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723348)) - Better and faster than gzip (4 comments): "Zstd, on the other hand, aims to be a “better gzip”, in that it's compresses about as fast as gzip but packs somewhat denser" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47388153)) "For the same CPU utilization if provides twice dense compression compared to regular [-6] gzip" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49798872)) "If you use Zstandard layers instead of gzip layers, startup time is improved." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47016456)) - Tunable levels and options (5 comments): "instead of tweaking the whole tunnel once, you can use --adapt to dynamically adjust to i/o conditions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508337)) "zstd gives you up to 22 for ultra compression and negative compression levels for ultra fast" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49601413)) "zstd -19 gave me the best results for small file sizes and fast decompression of text data" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47776986)) ## What people warn about - Not always the densest compression (3 comments): "no combination of flags to zstd gets it to match the size of brotli's output on that particular file" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46720595)) "RePair is faster than compressing with zstd and the size reduction is almost the same" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45908541)) "not in compression density, I don't believe, but yeah, along most other metrics" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50001569)) - Not best for every workload (3 comments): "zstd might lose out there, the answer seems to vary based on the tests I look at, but it seems to be better across a very wide range" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46727072)) "Of course for other kinds of files, zstd wins, but all the claims that zstd should be used for ALL applications are extremely wrong." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47386680)) "It didn't work, or the gains were so marginal that I ended up scrapping the approach." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49601251)) ## Alternatives hackers 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 - [xz](https://hackerapproved.com/p/xz.md): 14 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Zstandard (zstd)", https://hackerapproved.com/p/zstd/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).