For a lot of things zip files are used for tar.gz isn't just an alternative but what you should have been using all along as you can do streaming reads, that be

For a lot of things zip files are used for tar.gz isn't just an alternative but what you should have been using all along as you can do streaming reads, that being said it dosn't have as good support and can't do random access from disk like zip can so it depends on what you are trying to do.