If you’ve ever had to decompress a file, you’re probably familiar with WINRAR or WinZip. Both utilities are designed to compress or extract data from compressed files, but other than that there are differences in performance and price.
In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the main differences between the two programs in terms of features and also take a quick look at price and performance.
What is WinRAR?
The question of whether people pay for WinRAR has become something of a joke. The program offers a 40-day free trial, after which you will be prompted to pay. However, after this trial period, it is free to use.
Believe it or not, WinRAR goes beyond a meme.
In fact, WinRAR has become one of the most common file archivers and compression utilities in Windows. It was released in April 1995 with the most recent update on June 29, 2020. The program is still supported and used all over the world.
Feature differences
You might think that the most obvious difference between WinRAR and WinZip is that one supports RAR files and the other supports ZIP files, but this is not the case – both programs support both types of files.
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In fact, here’s a breakdown of all supported file types for each.
| WinRAR | WinZIP |
| ZIP | ZIP |
| RAR | RAR |
| 7Z | 7Z |
| CAB | CAB |
| LZH | LZH |
| ZIPX | ZIPX |
| ISO | ISO |
| TAR | TAR |
| GZip | GZip |
| XZ | XZ |
| BZ2 | BZ2 |
| Z | Z |
| UUE | VHD |
| GZ | VDMX |
| 001 | |
| ARJ | JAR |
Both programs can compress and extract files, although their performance does not differ much.
It should be noted that while WinZip works on Mac, WinRAR is only available for Windows. If you want to work with RAR files on the Mac platform, there are other options to choose from (including WinZip itself).
Price: The free trial version of WinRAR is permanent
WinRAR is the preferred option for many users due to its free price. It offers a 40-day free trial after which you will be prompted to pay, but it never applies. In fact, the endless free trial has become part of the WinRAR business model.
For the average user, WinRAR is a random tool. The company actually derives most of its profits from special features included for enterprise-grade customers.
On the other hand, WinZip offers a 21-day trial. After this period, you will have to pay, otherwise the service will stop working. As a result, WinZip is often viewed as a “premium” service, although the performance difference is not so significant.
Performance: very little difference
To compare the performance of WinRAR and WinZip, we created a benchmark consisting of 20 files of different types and sizes, including documents, images, video and audio. Overall, the files were 1.78 GB in size. We measured the compression ratio, the time it takes to compress the files, and the final result.
WinRAR compressed files in 2 minutes 6 seconds. Upon completion, the final compressed file size was 1.77 GB – not much difference.
On the other hand, WinZip took 11 seconds to add files to its folder and then compress them in the background, making it much more difficult to keep track of the total time. However, the end result was the same: 1% compression for a final size of 1.77 GB.
None of the programs compressed the files very much, but this is due to the fact that most of the files were multimedia. Multimedia files are usually not highly compressed because they are already compressed. On the other hand, documents and text files undergo much more compression.
Many people these days choose 7zip over WinRAR because it comes pre-installed on many PCs or packaged with GPU drivers. WinRAR is still useful, however, especially if you want to improve compression without the high cost.
Don’t worry if you don’t pay for WinRAR. As we said earlier, this is part of the business model. What the company gets from enterprise-level purchases more than makes up for users who only need to unzip a file once or twice a year.
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