papaw vs PECompact
papaw
github.comPECompact
bitsum.comSide by side
| Figure | papaw | PECompact |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Executable Packers | 7.9 (#8) | 7.9 (#9) |
| Compression | Supported algorithms are LZMA2, LZMA1, Zstandard, and Deflate. | The maker says PECompact preprocesses PE code and data to improve compression compared with general archivers. |
| Purpose | papaw is a permissively licensed packer for executables with statically linked third-party components, intended for devices with limited disk space. | PECompact compresses Windows native executable files (PEs). |
Plans
PECompact
- One Product$429, paid once
- Three Products$689, paid once
- Unlimited Products$1,498, paid once
In their own words
papaw
papaw is a Linux executable packer for programs that include statically linked third-party components, aimed at devices with limited disk space. It compresses executables and bundles them with a decompressor of about 15–40 KB. Supported algorithms are LZMA2, LZMA1, Zstandard and Deflate, and packed executables can replace themselves on disk when run. The project is free and unencumbered software under the MIT license, and can be self-hosted. It uses Meson and can be included as a Meson subproject; the README recommends `custom_target()` for running `papawify`. Prebuilt static binaries are available through GitHub releases, with example assets for aarch64, arm, armeb, i386, mips, mipsel and x86_64. To support portability, the project avoids machine-specific assembly and newer system calls such as `fexecve()`. Optional very basic anti-debugging protection is intended to discourage trivial reverse-engineering techniques. The payload is extracted to a temporary file; when run as root, papaw mounts a tmpfs filesystem and lazily unmounts it before extraction.