Comment by Iburinoc

In general, xz beats zstd in compression ratio, as xz is very committed to providing the strongest compression, at the expense of speed, while zstd provides a range of compression ratio vs speed tradeoffs [0]. At the lower levels, zstd isn't approaching xz's compression level, but it's doing it much much faster. Additionally, zstd generally massively outperforms xz in decompression speed

  $ time xz linux-4.14-rc6.tar

  real    4m26.009s
  user    4m24.828s
  sys     0m0.724s

  $ wc -c linux-4.14-rc6.tar.xz
  103705148 linux-4.14-rc6.tar.xz

  $ time zstd --ultra -20 linux-4.14-rc6.tar
  linux-4.14-rc6.tar   : 12.81%   (824350720 => 105564246 bytes, linux-4.14-rc6.tar.zst)

  real    4m34.129s
  user    4m33.484s
  sys     0m0.432s

  $ time cat linux-4.14-rc6.tar.xz | xz -d > out1                                                                                                                                           

  real    0m9.677s
  user    0m6.608s
  sys     0m0.704s

  $ time cat linux-4.14-rc6.tar.zst | zstd -d > out2

  real    0m1.702s
  user    0m1.220s
  sys     0m0.520s

[0]: https://github.com/facebook/zstd/blob/dev/doc/images/DCspeed...