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XZ Utils vs GNU Gzip: catalog facts
XZ Utils	GNU Gzip
Free The software is free under its open-source licence. Hosting, hardware and external…	Free Free software from the GNU Project.
Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line	Linux, Command line
LZMA2 compression gives some of the best ratios available for general-purpose data, and the tools ship on effectively…	Available on nearly every Unix-like system The .gz format is read almost everywhere
Compression is slow and memory-hungry at high levels, and the 2024 backdoor incident in the upstream release tarballs…	Compresses single files or streams, not multi-file archives Lower compression ratio than xz, zstd or lzip
Downloadable app	Downloadable app
Open source	Open source
License: 0BSD	License: GPL-3.0-or-later
Not stated if an account is needed	No account needed
Not stated if it works offline	Works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 22, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked September 23, 2026

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