CompactGUI icon
CompactGUI icon

CompactGUI

 6 likes

CompactGUI is a standalone GUI to make using the Windows 10 compact.exe function easier to use. This allows games, programs and other folders to be compressed transparently (i.e they can still be used normally) with no performance loss.

CompactGUI screenshot 1

License model

  • FreeOpen Source

Country of Origin

  • AU flagAustralia

Platforms

  • Windows  Windows 10 only
5 / 5 Avg rating (1)
6likes
1comment
0news articles

Features

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  1.  Portable
  2.  Lossless Compression
  3.  File Compression

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CompactGUI information

  • Developed by

    AU flagImminentFate
  • Licensing

    Open Source (GPL-3.0) and Free product.
  • Alternatives

    1 alternatives listed
  • Supported Languages

    • English

AlternativeTo Categories

OS & UtilitiesSystem & HardwareFile ManagementGaming Software

GitHub repository

  •  6,191 Stars
  •  265 Forks
  •  22 Open Issues
  •   Updated Jul 5, 2025 
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Our users have written 1 comments and reviews about CompactGUI, and it has gotten 6 likes

CompactGUI was added to AlternativeTo by Lorton on Jan 30, 2018 and this page was last updated Nov 12, 2021.

Comments and Reviews

   
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Top Positive Comment
stranger46
Jan 2, 2024
0

Impressive performance! I got almost 200 Gb of free space thanks to this software.

What is CompactGUI?

CompactGUI is a standalone GUI to make using the Windows 10 compact.exe function easier to use. This allows games, programs and other folders to be compressed transparently (i.e they can still be used normally) with no performance loss.

This is similar to the NTFS-LZNT1 compression built-in to Windows (Right click > Properties > Compress to save space) however the newer algorithms that CompactGUI uses were introduced in Windows 10 and are much more efficient, multi-threaded, and designed for use on executable programs resulting in greater compression ratios with almost no performance impact. Those with older HDDs may even see a decent performance gain in the form of reduced loading times as the smaller files means it takes less time to read programs and games into RAM.

The compression is fully transparent - programs, games and files can still be accessed as normal, and show up in Explorer as they normally would — they'll just be decompressed into RAM at runtime, staying compressed on disk.

Use this tool to:

  • Reduce the size of games (e.g. Assassin's Creed Unity: 49GB > 28GB)
  • Reduce the size of programs (e.g. Libre Office: 490MB > 220MB)
  • Compress any other folder on your computer

Extra Features:

  • Visual feedback on compression progress and statistics
  • Online integration with community-sourced database to get compression estimates and analyses
  • Integration into Windows Explorer context menus for easier use.
  • Drag-and-drop functionality
  • Analyze the status of existing folders
  • Shutdown/restart/sleep on completion.

Note: This tool is intentionally designed to only compress folders and files. Whole drives and entire Windows installations cannot be modified from within CompactGUI - users seeking that functionality should use "compact /compactOS" from the commandline.