zstd VS Snappy

Compare zstd vs Snappy and see what are their differences.

zstd

Zstandard - Fast real-time compression algorithm (by facebook)

Snappy

A fast compressor/decompressor (by google)
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zstd Snappy
105 5
22,356 5,977
2.2% 0.6%
9.7 2.6
8 days ago 12 days ago
C C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

zstd

Posts with mentions or reviews of zstd. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-01.

Snappy

Posts with mentions or reviews of Snappy. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-11-14.
  • Why I enjoy using the Nim programming language at Reddit.
    10 projects | /r/RedditEng | 14 Nov 2022
    Another example of Nim being really fast is the supersnappy library. This library benchmarks faster than Google’s C or C++ Snappy implementation.
  • Stretch iPhone to Its Limit: 2GiB Stable Diffusion Model Runs Locally on Device
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Nov 2022
    It doesn't destroy performance for the simple reason that nowadays memory access has higher latency than pure compute. If you need to use compute to produce some data to be stored in memory, your overall throughput could very well be faster than without compression.

    There have been a large amount of innovation on fast compression in recent years. Traditional compression tools like gzip or xz are geared towards higher compression ratio, but memory compression tends to favor speed. Check out those algorithms:

    * lz4: https://lz4.github.io/lz4/

    * Google's snappy: https://github.com/google/snappy

    * Facebook's zstd in fast mode: http://facebook.github.io/zstd/#benchmarks

  • Compression with best ratio and fast decompression
    1 project | /r/learnprogramming | 30 Aug 2022
    Google released Snappy, which is extremely fast and robust (both at compression and decompression), but it's definitely not nearly as good (in terms of compression ratio). Google mostly uses it for real-time compression, for example of network messages - not for long-term storage.
  • How to store item info?
    1 project | /r/GameDevelopment | 4 Sep 2021
    Just compress it! Of course if you will you ZIP, players will able to just open this zip file and change whatever they want. But you can use less popular compression algorithms which are not supported by default Windows File Explorer. Snappy for example.
  • What's the best way to compress strings?
    6 projects | /r/cpp | 29 Jul 2021

What are some alternatives?

When comparing zstd and Snappy you can also consider the following projects:

LZ4 - Extremely Fast Compression algorithm

LZMA - (Unofficial) Git mirror of LZMA SDK releases

brotli - Brotli compression format

7-Zip-zstd - 7-Zip with support for Brotli, Fast-LZMA2, Lizard, LZ4, LZ5 and Zstandard

ZLib - A massively spiffy yet delicately unobtrusive compression library.

zlib-ng - zlib replacement with optimizations for "next generation" systems.

haproxy - HAProxy Load Balancer's development branch (mirror of git.haproxy.org)

tiny_jpeg.h - Single header lib for JPEG encoding. Public domain. C99. stb style.