Best of / Rust crates / compression
Best of · ranked by real use · data Oct 24, 2026
Best Rust crates for compression
Short answerBy real use, the top Rust crates for compression are miniz_oxide (2.5M a day), flate2 (2.1M a day), zstd (1.1M a day). miniz_oxide is our default pick: 2,510,979 real downloads a day and 443 dependents. Gaining fastest against the field: miniz_oxide (+15%). 4 of these 8 shipped in the last 90 days.
Our picks
- Default pick: miniz_oxide. The most used that still ships releases, so the most answered questions and the likeliest to already be in your tree.
- Most recently released: zip (7 days ago).
The ranking
| # | Crate | Real downloads a day | Dependents | Trend vs field | Last release | What it is (its own description) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | miniz_oxide Established | 2,510,979 | 443 | +15% | 7mo | DEFLATE compression and decompression library rewritten in Rust based on miniz |
| 2 | flate2 Widely used | 2,127,583 | 7,758 | +4% | 57d | DEFLATE compression and decompression exposed as Read/BufRead/Write streams. Supports miniz_oxide and... |
| 3 | zstd Widely used | 1,083,388 | 2,614 | +6% | 8d | Binding for the zstd compression library |
| 4 | zip Widely used | 977,272 | 4,151 | +6% | 7d | Library to support the reading and writing of zip files |
| 5 | brotli Established | 841,265 | 613 | +12% | 52d | A brotli compressor and decompressor that with an interface avoiding the rust stdlib. This makes it suitable... |
| 6 | lz4_flex Established | 475,029 | 717 | +1% | 3mo | Fastest LZ4 implementation in Rust, no unsafe by default |
| 7 | bzip2 Established | 435,362 | 580 | -3% | 12mo | Bindings to libbzip2 for bzip2 compression and decompression exposed as Reader/Writer streams |
| 8 | snap Established | 318,500 | 318 | -2% | 3mo | A pure Rust implementation of the Snappy compression algorithm. Includes streaming compression and decompression |
Rules
Candidates: crates whose own README says they do this job, picked by hand (flate2, zstd, brotli, lz4_flex, xz2, zip, snap, bzip2, miniz_oxide, lz4); one appears when we have 80+ days of crates.io data for it. Ranked by real downloads a day (quiet-day median, release-day spikes removed), crates.io data Oct 24, 2026. The default pick is the top crate that shipped a release in the last 2 years. Downloads measure use, not quality, and crates that other libraries pull in rank above tools you add yourself: read each description for fit.
Up next
Another best-of list: Same rules, same data.Best Rust crates for hashing and checksumsRead it next →