Many users that endure file and folder compression on a regular basis seek to adopt alternative applications from the standard windows-incorporated program, 'WinZip'. This can be for all kinds of reasons, some based on performance, some on user interface or compatibility, etc. To help you with such an arduous search, today we are going to compare two of the most popular compression utilities, WinRAR and 7-Zip.
The Idea, The Plan
 
WinRAR 'Archiver' and 7-Zip 'File Manager' application windows
WinRAR appeared in the late 90's as our first saviour from the dreaded Windows application. It had a far better user system with nice context menus, it was faster and more efficient, it allowed data encryption, and even the ability to modify and customise compression factors and formats. Generally, WinRAR was an all around upgrade to the standard Microsoft made program.
7-Zip is a more recent shrink wrapping extension to be embraced by compression fans. Straight away looking at this utility we can see that it is an open source project in comparison with the trail and license based WinRAR, which gives it at least one up straight away in our books. 7-Zip boasts the same encryption and factor setting options as WinRAR, and its website looks like it just might have been updated in the last 5 years, unlike a certain Rarlab team home page. On their Website the team behind 7-Zip posted the following statistic.
After a careful look at this chart, the results that they are presenting us here are a little... incomplete. The 7-Zip team has shown the difference between its own '7z' format and the 'zip' format, but has neglected to showcase how the WinRAR archiver performs in both '.zip' and '.rar' formats. Could this mean that 7zip is out-performed by WinRAR on this front?
Page 01: Introduction
Page 02: Testing
Page 03: Results
Page 04: Conclusion
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