Htool is a lightweight header-only C++11 library that provides an easy-to-use interface for distributed matrix compression via hierarchical matrices. Its goal is to provide minimal linear algebra and iterative linear solvers. In this talk, we will briefly introduce hierarchical matrices, and we will illustrate the parallel implementation provided by Htool. Finally, we will present the structure of the library, and the choices that have been made to facilitate interfacing Htool with other libraries like HPDDM and PETSc.