There's a podcast with the creator courtesy of corecursive, it's a good story.

"in the final comparison, ZStandard beat ZLib in every way. At the same compression ratio, it compresses three to five times faster .at the same compression speed, it results in files that are 10 to 15% smaller. And besides all this, it can decompress twice as fast regardless of compression speed. The only thing even close to ZStandard is Brotli from Google."

https://corecursive.com/data-compression-yann-collet/#

On the compression side ZSTD is good all around. It'll give similar results at the ultra high compression side as LZMA in terms of ratio and speed but also scales to be a fantastic choice if you just want to pipe something through at a few hundred mbps and still get decent compression. ZSTD is also much cleaner in its multithreading scaling in terms of memory usage and the like.

On the decompression side ZSTD is absolutely blazing in comparison to LZMA. Decompression requirements also don't scale based in compression settings (i.e. doing some ultra super duper compression of a big file places no more memory requirement on the client doing the decompression later).

In short, ZSTD is great because it can be your reliable go-to regardless of your particularly use case. For more detail check out https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2017/03/07/better-compression-...