Convert TAR.GZ to ZIP Online — Share Linux Archives on Windows
TAR.GZ is the standard archive format on Linux and macOS, but many Windows users find it confusing. Windows 11 can handle some TAR archives, but .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, and .tar.xz often cause problems in File Explorer. Converting to ZIP means the person you're sharing with can open the archive without thinking twice.
FastZip converts TAR.GZ to ZIP directly in your browser. No command line, no 7-Zip, no installation — just a private, in-browser conversion that produces a standard ZIP file.
Typical use cases:
- A developer receives a Linux package from a colleague and needs to inspect it on Windows
- A designer is sent source assets as .tar.gz and needs to open them on macOS without Terminal
- A data analyst downloads a .tgz dataset and wants a ZIP to attach to a report
- An open-source project distributes releases as .tar.gz but a user wants the ZIP for Windows compatibility
What gets converted — FastZip extracts every file from the TAR archive (handling the gzip, bzip2, or xz decompression layer first), then re-packages them into a ZIP with DEFLATE compression. Directory structure is preserved. File timestamps are preserved. Unix permissions are noted in the file listing but are not encoded into the ZIP (ZIP doesn't store them the same way).
Size expectations — The output ZIP may be slightly larger or smaller than the original TAR.GZ depending on file content. For source code, expect roughly similar sizes. For binary files, the ZIP may be slightly larger since DEFLATE is less efficient than LZMA-based compression.
Format & Feature Reference
| Source Format | Outer Compression | FastZip Support |
|---|---|---|
| .tar.gz / .tgz | gzip | Full |
| .tar.bz2 / .tbz2 | bzip2 | Full |
| .tar.xz / .txz | xz (LZMA) | Full |
| .tar.lz4 | lz4 | Full |
| .tar.zst | zstandard | Full |
| .tar (uncompressed) | None | Full |
| Output format | — | ZIP (DEFLATE) |
Converting npm Package Archives to ZIP
npm packages are distributed as .tgz files when you run npm pack. If you need to share a built npm package with someone who isn't a developer (a client reviewing assets, a QA team member, a designer), converting the .tgz to ZIP makes it accessible without any Node.js tooling.
The resulting ZIP preserves the package/ directory structure that npm creates, with all the package files inside exactly as they would be after npm install.
Converting Linux Source Archives for Windows Inspection
Open-source projects distribute source tarballs as .tar.gz or .tar.xz. If you need to review source code on a Windows machine where you don't have WSL or MSYS2 installed, converting to ZIP means you can browse the code in File Explorer or open it directly in VS Code.
FastZip converts even large source archives (up to 200 MB compressed) entirely in the browser. Larger archives are a planned Pro feature.