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XZ Utils vs LZ4: catalog facts
XZ Utils	LZ4
Free The software is free under its open-source licence. Hosting, hardware and external…	Free Free and open source.
Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line	Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line
LZMA2 compression gives some of the best ratios available for general-purpose data, and the tools ship on effectively…	Very fast compression and decompression Scales across CPU cores
Compression is slow and memory-hungry at high levels, and the 2024 backdoor incident in the upstream release tarballs…	Lower compression ratio than zstd or xz Compresses single files or streams, not a full archiver
Downloadable app	Downloadable app
Open source	Open source
License: 0BSD	License: BSD-2-Clause (library), GPL-2.0 (command-line tool)
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.