Four Compression And Archiving Solutions Compared

Results Summary

This is the overall score for the proprietary formats. We multiplied processing time by the resulting archive size. Obviously, lower results are better. Clearly, WinZip, one of the most popular and user-friendly solutions, is a real loser in this test because of its single-threaded processing limitations. Once its developers spend the time to optimize their software, the app will do much better. Until then, it looks like your recommendation (and our subsequent decision to remove WinZip from our benchmarking suite) was a good one.

WinRAR provides excellent results in both settings, but the real winner is 7-Zip at LZMA2 default compression. If you want quick processing and a great compression ratio, this app topped our 650MB mixed test data.

Let’s look at the ZIP results, which might be more relevant for many users. Again, 7-Zip dominates by delivering high compression with a very fast processing time. WinRAR and WinZip trail significantly. Best compression extends the processing time quite a bit, especially on 7-Zip.