Alternatives to Lzip
A command-line lossless compressor using a simplified LZMA, designed for long-term archiving and data safety. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Lzip
A command-line lossless compressor using a simplified LZMA, designed for long-term archiving and data safety.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Lzip.
XZ Utils
The standard command-line tool for creating and reading .xz files.
XZ Utils also uses LZMA-family compression, ships on nearly every Linux and BSD system, and runs on Windows and macOS, but lacks lzip's recovery options.
Zstandard
Meta's compression tool that hits near-zlib ratios at far higher speed, now used across Linux and modern filesystems.
Zstandard trades some maximum ratio for much faster compression and decompression, runs on Windows and macOS too, and its .zst files may not open on older systems.
GNU Gzip
The GNU command-line compression program that creates and decompresses .gz files.
GNU Gzip produces the almost universally readable .gz format with a similar command line, but gives a lower compression ratio than lzip.
bzip2
A long-established command-line block-sorting compressor and library for .bz2 files.
bzip2 uses block-sorting compression with limited recovery from damaged media, is widely supported, and runs slower than modern compressors such as zstd.
bzip3
A command-line compressor and library intended as a stronger successor to bzip2.
bzip3 aims for better compression than bzip2 on large text and source archives, but its .bz3 format is less widely supported than gzip or bzip2.
LZ4
A lossless compression format and command-line tool built for very high compression and decompression speed.
LZ4 focuses on very fast compression and decompression across CPU cores, accepting a lower compression ratio than lzip's LZMA-based format.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Lzip 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.
Lzip uses a simplified LZMA focused on long-term archiving with integrity checks and recovery options, but it is single-threaded unless you use plzip.
lrzip
A command-line compressor for large files that finds redundancy across long distances in the data.
Lzip focuses on long-term archiving with integrity checks and data recovery options, using a simplified LZMA, but is single-threaded without plzip.
pixz
A parallel, indexing xz compressor that allows random access into compressed tar.xz archives.
Lzip uses the .lz format with integrity checks and recovery options for long-term archives, but it is single-threaded and needs plzip for multi-core speed.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
par2cmdline
The reference command-line tool for creating PAR2 recovery files and repairing damaged file sets.
GNU Tar
The GNU command-line tool for creating, extracting, updating and listing tar archives.
zpaqfranz
Keep compressed, versioned archives of changing files.
7-Zip
The small, free archiver that opens practically every archive format and compresses better than ZIP.
