- maximum compatibility (while tolerating low performance) - gzip
- great performance (while tolerating larger files) - snappy
- very good performance with good (not best) compression ratios - zstd
I don't really want to use Any New Shiny Algo to compress some data that might outlive this piece of software, that's why I use gzip very often, because I know I'll always be able to decompress it. But I've been increasingly adopting zstd and snappy for one single reason - they are becoming widely supported within the ecosystems I work in (data processing).
That, to me, is more important than compression ratios and decompression speeds.