Bandizip vs Zstandard

Bandizip is an archiver for compressing and extracting files on Windows and macOS. It creates formats including ZIP, 7Z, ZIPX, EXE, TAR, and ISO, and extracts more than 40 formats, including RAR and RAR5. It supports multi-volume and high-capacity compression, smart extraction, and editing files inside an archive. AES-256 encryption is available, and 7Z archives can encrypt filenames. On Windows, archive scanning uses the system antivirus through Microsoft AMSI and requires Windows 10 or later with real-time protection enabled. The free Standard Edition includes ads and limited features; its malware scan is restricted to archived files smaller than 1 MB and cannot detect malware in every archive or format. Professional Edition adds a password manager, ZIP archive repair, password recovery, and image previews inside archives. It costs 30.00 USD once for one user on up to five PCs at a time. Enterprise Edition costs 20.00 USD once per single-PC license, with a minimum purchase of two. Windows support covers versions 7, 8, 8.1, 10, and 11; macOS requires version 10.13 or later.

Zstandard is a lossless compression algorithm for real-time workloads, with controls that let users shift compression speed and ratio in small increments. Its reference implementation includes a C library and a command-line utility that creates and decodes .zst, .gz, .xz, and .lz4 files. The format is stable and documented in RFC 8878; the implementation is available under BSD or GPLv2. For small, related samples, training can produce a data-specific dictionary to improve compression. The same dictionary must be present for both compression and decompression, and the samples need to be correlated; there is no universal dictionary. The project documents builds with Make, CMake, Meson, Visual Studio, Buck, and Bazel, plus installation using vcpkg and Conan. Community bindings and ports are listed for languages including Python, Rust, Java, C#, JavaScript, Go, PHP, and Swift. Zstandard is free, with a free plan, and supports Linux, Windows, and macOS.