For a benchmark on a standard set: https://github.com/inikep/lzbench/blob/master/lzbench18_sort... Of course, you may get different results with another dataset.

gzip (zlib -6) [ratio=32%] [compr=35Mo/s] [dec=407Mo/s]

zstd (zstd -2) [ratio=32%] [compr=356Mo/s] [dec=1067Mo/s]

NB1: The default for zstd is -3, but the table only had -2. The difference is probably small. The range is 1-22 for zstd and 1-9 for gzip.

NB2: The default program for gzip (at least with Debian) is the executable from zlib. With my workflows, libdeflate-gzip iscompatible and noticably faster.

NB3: This benchmark is 2 years old. The latest releases of zstd are much better, see https://github.com/facebook/zstd/releases

For a high compression, according to this benchmark xz can do slightly better, if you're willing to pay a 10× penalty on decompression.

xz -9 [ratio=23%] [compr=2.6Mo/s] [dec=88Mo/s]

zstd -18 [ratio=25%] [compr=3.6Mo/s] [dec=912Mo/s]