Is 7-Zip better than WinZip and WinRar?

Posted on March 7, 2009 at 5:29 am

Alright, you already know about WinRar and WinZip, so why do we still need another program for the same zipping task? The answer is simple, both WinRar and WinZip are not free. If you want to save few precious dollars without compromising the functionality of a zipping program, then 7-Zip is worth a try.

To get 7-Zip, go to their main page at http://www.7zip.com/. It only works on Windows, sorry Mac and Linux users.

Install it on your pc and it is as easy to use as WinRar and WinZip. To zip a file just right click it and click choose 7-Zip > add to [file name].7z

Since it is integrated with Windows Explorer, it is just a few clicks away. Very easy isn’t it?

Now that you know how to use it, let me explain why I consider this software better than WinZip and WinRar. You see a zipping tool’s strength lies on its capability to compress files as efficiently as it can. That means, the smaller the zipped file, the better. For the purposes of comparison I compared the different tool’s output so you can see which baby packs files the best.

1. The document test. As a technical writer I create a lot of documents. I have one of my web blog posts tested using the three tools. The results are below:

You can see that the original document, a wpost file, takes the most amount of space at 1.788MB. When I zipped it using WinZip, it was packed into a 1.386MB. WinRar was able to compress the file at 0.583MB which is less than half the size of the Zip output – impressive! Although WinRar was a giant leap than WinZip, 7Zip beat it by a few Kilobytes. In my humble document test, Z-Zip beat the other two.

2. The JPEG test. The next test I did was on a JPEG file. This is where the 7-Zip format lost to the other two. The packed results were not that far to the original JPEG file. This makes sense because JPEG files are already compressed files in the first place. So a lesson is drawn from this test, it is not very beneficial to zip JPEG files.

3. The MP3 test. Out of curiosity, I tested the tools again on a compressed format – the MP3. We can see that the results are also not far from the size of the original MP3 file.

4. The bitmap test. I chose to test the tools with an uncompressed bitmap file so we can see some real zipping magic. From the results, it is obvious that the 7-Zip tool out zipped the other two.

Although I performed only a few tests on 4 file types, based from the consistent results I can safely assume that 7-Zip can easily beat the other tools if the input files are uncompressed files like .doc, .bmp, .xls, .cvs, etc. If we all regularly use zipping tools to compress uncompressed file types, 7-Zip is a no-brainer choice.

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

» Filed Under Software Reviews

Comments

10 Responses to “Is 7-Zip better than WinZip and WinRar?”

Rick said on : March 7th, 2009 at 9:15 am

I support your choice of 7-zip, not only because of it’s compression abilities, but because it is Free and Open Source Software, also, 7-zip is capable of handling archives in .zip, .rar, .tar, and .7z, making it extremely versatile.

Keep spreading the word about open source software!

Marty said on : March 8th, 2009 at 3:33 pm

Choosing .7z works fine unless you need to share files with others who may not have 7-zip installed. Also, WinZip has several types of compression, but I don’t see any mention of which type you used. Assuming you used Legacy PKZip 2.0 compression, it’s no surprise the newer formats produced smaller files, but at the expense of compatibility. If you’re not worried about compatiblity then a fair test would use WinZip’s other compression methods like bzip2 or PPMd.

ericq said on : March 9th, 2009 at 4:35 am

I Use IZarc. It’s free and can open i think every compressed file.
It also can create lots of files include 7zip, tar and zip file.
Rar file creating is posible wen u use the command line version of winrar.

http://www.izarc.org/

pc tips online said on : March 9th, 2009 at 4:59 am

Yes, you are right. I downloaded 7-zip and almost repeated all of your experiments using the default options in every application. The result shows that 7-zip is outperform other two tools.

Thank you again for this information, and by the way, I have tried .pdf files and the result is the same.

Matt said on : March 10th, 2009 at 7:06 am

This is the worst test I have ever seen. No details were given as to what compression methods were used in each compression program.

FAIL.

Tom said on : March 10th, 2009 at 9:18 am

“sorry Mac and Linux users”
It does not matter for linux, file-roller has 7zip support for compressing and decompressing built in. I presume Mac’s file unzipper has support for it too.

jambo said on : March 10th, 2009 at 9:28 am

“It only works on Windows, sorry Mac and Linux users.”

If you had looked at the sourceforge project page ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/ ) or at the creators homepage ( http://www.7-zip.org/ ) instead of some random website named alike, you would see that not only Linux and Mac are supported but also many other platforms are able to use 7-zip.

Also the random website you linked points to older version of 7-zip (hosted at sourceforge, but who knows when the page creator will change that link to some virus ladden file).
–

Other than that great post

suli said on : March 11th, 2009 at 2:21 am

7-zip can also uses LZMA with zip format. But you can’t open this type of zip file with winrar. I have not done a test with winzip, but i think winrar can’t open a zip file compressed with PPMd too. So it is no use to compress a file into zip format using some advanced methed, unless you love the “.zip” text in the filename^_^

I prefer to 7-zip. If you are not sure about which uncompressor the other one is using, you can compress the files with zip format. 7-zip provide two compressing opinions in context menu, one for 7z, one for zip, at the same time.

Reshma said on : March 11th, 2009 at 11:55 am

You could also use Peazip, which is a better compression software in the way that it supports more formats and even the latest format – bzip2. It is an open source software as is 7zip. Gr8 work and keep writing!

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