Alternatives to Brotli
Compress and decompress data using the Brotli format. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Brotli
Compress and decompress data using the Brotli format.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Brotli.
Zstandard
Meta's compression tool that hits near-zlib ratios at far higher speed, now used across Linux and modern filesystems.
Zstandard is a BSD-licensed command-line compressor with an RFC-standardised format, fast speeds and dictionary support, and it also reads and writes gzip, xz and lz4.
XZ Utils
The standard command-line tool for creating and reading .xz files.
XZ Utils uses LZMA2 for higher ratios on general data and ships on nearly every Linux and BSD system, but compression is slow and memory-hungry.
GNU Gzip
The GNU command-line compression program that creates and decompresses .gz files.
GNU Gzip produces .gz files that are read almost everywhere, but it is single-threaded, GPL-licensed and has a lower compression ratio than xz or zstd.
LZ4
A lossless compression format and command-line tool built for very high compression and decompression speed.
LZ4 favours very fast compression and decompression that scales across CPU cores, at a lower compression ratio than zstd or xz.
bzip2
A long-established command-line block-sorting compressor and library for .bz2 files.
bzip2 is a long-established block-sorting compressor with a stable, widely supported format and limited recovery from damaged media, though slower than modern compressors.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Brotli as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
Kanzi
A multi-threaded lossless data compressor written in Java with selectable transforms and entropy codecs.
Brotli is an MIT-licensed compressor and library with a widely used format, though its stream format lacks checksums and original length metadata.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
7-Zip-zstd
Build of 7-Zip that adds Zstandard, Brotli, LZ4, LZ5 and Fast-LZMA2 compression.
ouch
Command-line tool that compresses and extracts archives without format-specific flags.
7-Zip
The small, free archiver that opens practically every archive format and compresses better than ZIP.
crabz
A cross-platform command-line tool for fast parallel compression and decompression, similar to pigz but written in Rust.
pigz
A parallel implementation of gzip that uses multiple CPU cores to compress data faster.
