I have noticed that 7-zip offers the best compression ratio out of the options you listed above when set for maximum compression. I personally am happy to hear this news.
And what's the difference? I alwasy though 7zip was a bit sketchy like rar archives, zips are more common on windows and on linux everywhere I see there are either gz, bz2 or xz.
xz is a much simplified version of the massively, insanely over-engineered and frankly impossible to implement 7-Zip format.