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GNU Gzip vs bzip2: catalog facts
GNU Gzip	bzip2
Free Free software from the GNU Project.	Free Free and open source under a BSD-style licence.
Linux, Command line	Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line
Available on nearly every Unix-like system The .gz format is read almost everywhere	Better compression than gzip on many inputs Limited recovery from damaged media
Compresses single files or streams, not multi-file archives Lower compression ratio than xz, zstd or lzip	Slower than modern compressors such as zstd Releases are rare
Downloadable app	Downloadable app
Open source	Open source
License: GPL-3.0-or-later	License: bzip2-1.0.6
No account needed	No account needed
Works offline	Works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 23, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 23, 2026

Catalog facts only. Anything “not stated” is unconfirmed. Check full listings for details.