The Zipling app icon: a silver zipper pull with a Z, on indigo

Coming soon for Mac

Smaller. Faster.
Every byte intact.

Zipling is a new archive manager for macOS. Its Arca engine understands what is inside your folders: photos, documents, apps and code. It makes archives smaller than 7-Zip's best setting, up to five times faster, and restores every byte exactly.

Follow along on GitHub See the benchmarks

Not available to download yet · For Apple silicon Macs

A Zipling archive window: 13 files, 23.7 MB packed to 7.5 MB (68% smaller), with each file's savings and method (Lepton for JPEGs, Unpacked + zstd for PDFs and PNGs, ARM64 + zstd for an app) and an inspector explaining how the archive got smaller.

5×

faster to compress than 7-Zip Ultra, and 5% smaller1

17%

smaller than 7-Zip Ultra at Zipling's Max setting1

55%

smaller than 7-Zip Ultra on PDF and screenshot folders

100%

byte-identical. Every block is checked with BLAKE3

Performance

Benchmarks, not adjectives.

A 736 MB folder of documents, photos, apps and source code, compressed and extracted on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro). Shorter bars are better.

Show these numbers as a table
ToolSize% of originalCompressExtract
All six benchmarks

−55%

PDFs & screenshots

Smaller than 7-Zip Ultra. Even the default setting is 43% smaller, and faster than 7-Zip.

−17%

Photos

JPEGs shrink without losing a single bit. Other tools manage 5–13% at best.

−8%

Mac apps

Smaller than 7-Zip Ultra on universal app bundles, in 15% less time.

1.7×

Faster extraction

The default setting extracts the mixed folder 1.7× faster than 7-Zip and 4× faster than Finder.

1 Mixed folder, compared with 7z -mx9. Every archive from every tool was extracted and compared byte for byte with the original. Times vary about ±10% between runs. Finder's Compress was measured in a separate session. Methodology, every dataset, and where Zipling is still behind →

Compare

Zipling and the rest.

Other Mac archivers wrap your files in ZIP or 7z. Zipling also looks inside them, and shrinks photos, PDFs and apps in ways ZIP and 7z can't.

Swipe sideways to see the other apps

Full comparison, including formats

The Arca engine

It understands your files.

Most archivers treat everything as anonymous bytes. Arca looks at what each file is, undoes the compression already hiding inside it, and picks the right tool for every kind of data. Then it puts it all back, bit for bit.

Photos, re-encoded losslessly

JPEGs pass through Lepton, which stores the same image in about a quarter less space and rebuilds the original file exactly.

Documents, unpacked

PDFs, PNGs, Office files and ZIPs hide old Deflate compression. Arca reverses it exactly, compresses the raw data with modern codecs, and re-creates the original stream.

Apps, tuned for Apple silicon

ARM64 machine code is filtered so that similar instructions line up, which makes app bundles compress noticeably better.

Duplicates, stored once

Content-defined chunking finds data that repeats across your files and keeps a single copy.

Every core, all the time

Files stream through a parallel pipeline into independent blocks, so packing and extraction keep every core of your Mac busy.

Verified, end to end

Every transform is checked by rebuilding the original before it is kept, and every block carries a BLAKE3 hash that extraction verifies.

The app

See where every byte went.

Zipling is a native Mac app built in SwiftUI. Open an archive and it shows, file by file, how much was saved and how.

  • Savings and method for every file, at a glance
  • "How it got smaller", explained in plain words
  • One-click verification of the whole archive
  • Drop files in to compress, open an archive to browse

Coming in 1.0

  • Opens everythingZIP, 7z, RAR, TAR, GZ, XZ and more
  • Lives in FinderQuick Look previews and a Finder menu
  • Shares anywhereStandard ZIP and 7z when the other side doesn't have Zipling
  • Locks it upEncryption and split archives
  • Survives damageRecovery records that repair broken archives
  • Feels nativeLight and dark mode, keyboard and VoiceOver support

Planned features. They are in development, not finished.

FAQ

Questions, answered.

When can I download Zipling?

Not yet. Zipling is in active development. Follow the project on GitHub to see it come together.

What will it cost?

Pricing hasn't been announced yet.

Is it really lossless?

Yes. Every transform is reversible, and Zipling proves it: it rebuilds each original during compression before keeping the smaller form, and checks a BLAKE3 hash of every block when extracting. In the benchmarks every archive was extracted and compared byte for byte with the source.

Can people without Zipling open my archives?

Zipling's own .zlg format is for when you want the smallest archive. When you share with someone who doesn't have Zipling, it will also create standard ZIP and 7z archives that open anywhere.

What is Arca?

Arca is the compression engine inside Zipling, written in Rust for speed and memory safety. It combines format-aware transforms (Lepton for JPEG, preflate for Deflate streams, an ARM64 code filter), deduplication, and modern codecs (Zstandard, LZMA2, PPMd) in parallel blocks.

I found a bug. Where do I report it?

Please open a bug report on GitHub. Include your macOS version and the steps that cause it, and leave out anything personal. Bug reports are public.

Which Macs will it run on?

Macs with Apple silicon.