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I've tried a few free compression utilities, but the ones I've found just seem a little lame compared to the commercial products. Is there a good one?

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closed as not constructive by Gareth, Sathya♦ Nov 24 '11 at 13:43

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11 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

I've been using IZArc for several years. Explorer integration, supports about every compression algorithm commonly used.

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I'm running Windows 7 x64 and this wins out over 7-Zip because of attention to detail. 7-Zip didn't change the icons of archive files, IZArc did. IZArc also puts icons on the context menu, 7-Zip does not. – raven Sep 7 '09 at 17:43
7-zip changes the icons, but you have to tell it to associate itself with the archive files from within the options dialog. – Nighthawk Sep 11 '09 at 19:02
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@Nighthawk: Maybe they haven't caught up to Windows 7 yet, but I am just still not impressed with 7-zip. I can't understand the frenzy of voting that it inspired. While I am more impressed with IZArc than 7-zip, neither have the polish of the commercial products. I guess I'll continue to pay $20 every year or two to update the one that I currently use. – raven Oct 3 '09 at 1:37
I've also been using IZarc in Windows for several years. – endolith Oct 12 '09 at 4:51
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up vote 135 down vote

7-Zip. Easy. It is seriously by far the best thing out there and is completely free.

If the creators of 7-Zip insulted your mother and you wanted something else, IZArc is good too.

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Too Easy, but +1 anyway :D – Drake Jul 17 '09 at 19:13
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+1 I also love that it supports 64Bit – Diago Jul 17 '09 at 19:14
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Use it all the time. – pianoman Jul 17 '09 at 19:17
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@raven The development of 7zip is really active (one of the most 10 active project on SourceForge) they have implemented and improved it a lot during last years – Drake Jul 17 '09 at 19:36
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+1! 7-Zip is the only thing I use anymore if I'm on Windows. – codeLes Jul 17 '09 at 19:36
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up vote 12 down vote

WinRAR or 7-zip.

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Thinking twice as hard takes twice the time! :( – John T Jul 17 '09 at 19:15
is winrar free? – kishore Jul 17 '09 at 20:17
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No, but every once in a while they give out a free license. And I can open an archive to a folder w/ 2 clicks using WinRAR. 7zip makes me go through a menu. – hyperslug Jul 17 '09 at 20:53
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It is free, just moanware – Chris S Jul 28 '09 at 9:40
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up vote 10 down vote

Have you considered just using the compression features built into Windows? I find them unobtrusive, simple to use and adequate for my needs.

Right click, Send To... Compressed (zipped) folder.

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+1 for the sake of simplicity. It works well enough for just .zip, but anything else will require another program. – phuzion Jul 18 '09 at 0:42
I can't understand why anyone would want to use any other file format when there's a perfectly good one supported as part of the OS. It's really well supported because the entire Office 2007 suite relies on ZIP format for saving its documents. If you haven't tried it, take a .docx (.xlsx, etc) and rename it to .zip. Voilla! You can now see all the internals of the office document, they are saved as zip files. – Tim Long Jul 28 '09 at 22:56
The zip support included in Windows XP is amazingly slow... Not sure why, but aside from small archives (drivers...) it's just unusable here :/ – bltxd Sep 8 '09 at 15:12
Yes but Windows XP is a decade out of date and probably running on older/slower hardware. If we're going to make speed comparisons then we should at least identify what platform we're comparing. I seriously doubt that speed of compression would be an issue on a modern dual- or quad- core CPU running Windows 7. – Tim Long May 20 '11 at 15:49
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up vote 7 down vote

TUGZip:

TUGZip is a powerful award-winning freeware archiving utility for Windows® that provides support for a wide range of compressed, encoded and disc-image files, as well as very powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration.

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By my personal experience, it is as good as 7-zip. Dont know why it is not upvoted enough – Lakshman Prasad Jul 17 '09 at 20:39
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Shell integration doesn't work in Windows 7 x64. I consider that the most important function of any archiving utility. If it can't provide an "Extract to <archive name>..." item on the context menu, it's useless to me. – raven Jul 19 '09 at 19:14
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up vote 5 down vote

zipgenius

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A little sloppy. The website and UI are poorly translated. – raven Jul 19 '09 at 19:20
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You must be a native English speaker, raven. Otherwise you would be already used to sloppy translations ;-) – John Smithers Jul 20 '09 at 6:40
Like TUGZip, the shell integration doesn't show up in Windows 7 x64. – Cameron Sep 6 '09 at 21:07
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up vote 3 down vote

I'm partial to PeaZip but freely admit most people seem to prefer 7-zip.

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up vote 3 down vote

The original, the best: GNU zip :)

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up vote 2 down vote

DotNetZip. Free, easy to use.

It's flexible, can read or write ZIP files with Unicode, AES encryption, ZIP64, variable compression ratios, self-extracting archives. Sometimes Unix utilities expect the timestamp associated to each entry in a ZIP file in a certain format. Mac tools (like Archive Utility) expect the timestamp to NOT be in Windows format. Sometimes applications expect ZIP files to encode the filenames in a particular code page. It can do any of those things. The tool allows you to include or exclude files into an archive based on size, or attribute, or timestamp, or filename, or some boolean combination of those criteria. You can say "(mtime > 2009-07-01) AND (size > 1mb)", and it will zip up all files modified after that date with sizes greater than 1 MB. Drag-n-drop works too.

DotNetZip is primarily a ZIP library. What started as a "sample tool" to demonstrate features in the library has become a reasonable free replacement for WinZip. There's an MSI installer, or you can just download a ZIP file with the EXE file and required DLL file in it.

DotNetZip tool

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+1 for mentioning DotNetZip so many times in your answer ;) That and its a nifty app. – Pauk Jul 27 '09 at 22:01
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up vote 1 down vote

When I don't care too much about the compression/decompression quality but in having a command line tool to do the job I use the "jar" tool bundled with java.

jar -xf youFile.zip

Extract the content of yourFile.zip in the current directory

jar -cf yourFile.zip thisFolder

Creates a .zip file named yourFile.zip with the contents of thisFolder

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What do you mean by "compression/decompression quality"? – MatrixFrog Aug 12 '09 at 3:46
@MatrixFrog: Like is not the best compression tool. – Oscar Reyes Aug 13 '09 at 2:21
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up vote 0 down vote

I put up quite a detailed feature list at Compressing with RAR vs ZIP for 7-zip

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