Zstandard, Brotli, LZ4 and lzip on macOS

macOS ships gzip and bzip2. Everything newer — Zstandard, Brotli, LZ4, lzip — is a Homebrew install and a shell pipeline away, and there is almost no GUI for any of it.

Purrchiver writes all four, as single-stream files or as compressed tars.

What each one is for

Format	Extension	Use it when
Zstandard	`.zst`, `.tar.zst`	You want gzip’s speed with much better ratios. The sensible modern default.
Brotli	`.br`, `.tar.br`	You’re working with web tooling — nginx, Cloudflare, npm all speak Brotli.
LZ4	`.lz4`, `.tar.lz4`	Speed matters more than size. Transient archives, fast local backups.
lzip	`.lz`, `.tar.lz`	Long-term archival. Designed for recoverability from partial corruption.
gzip	`.gz`, `.tar.gz`	Maximum compatibility. Everything reads it.
xz	`.xz`, `.tar.xz`	High ratios, slow. Common for Linux source tarballs.

Purrchiver reads all of these and more, including LZMA .lzma for old Linux tarballs.

Instead of the shell

Creating a Zstandard-compressed tar from a terminal means getting a pipeline right:

tar -cf - ./project | zstd -T0 -19 > project.tar.zst

and remembering the reverse to unpack it:

zstd -d project.tar.zst | tar -xf -

In Purrchiver that’s the Create Archive sheet: select the folder, pick tar, pick Zstandard, pick a level. Opening one is a double-click.

Nothing here is a wrapper around a Homebrew install — the compressors are built into the app. There’s nothing to install, nothing to keep updated, and it works the same on a machine you don’t administer.

Compression levels

Four settings, not a numeric scale: Store, Fast, Normal, Best.

Normal is the default and is what you want nearly always. The benchmarks page has measured wall-clock times and compression ratios for every format at its default, head-to-head against the native command-line tool for each — run on Apple silicon, generated from the same engine that ships in the app. If you’re deciding between formats on real numbers rather than folklore, start there.

Encrypting any of them

None of these formats has built-in encryption. A .tar.zst has no password field — there’s nowhere to put one.

Purrchiver handles that with age, which encrypts the finished file rather than the format’s internals. That’s what produces a tar.zst.age: tarred, Zstandard-compressed, then wrapped in an age envelope. It works over any of the formats on this page, and over .iso, .dmg, and Apple Archives too.

Free vs. the unlock

Opening and extracting every format on this page is free. If someone sends you a .tar.zst or a .br file, you don’t pay anything to read it.

Creating with gzip, bzip2, plain tar, and ZIP is also free. Zstandard, Brotli, LZ4, lzip, xz, and 7z creation are part of the one-time $9.99 unlock — no subscription, no account.

Get Purrchiver on the Mac App Store →