The first is to test (de)compressing a ZIP file as it’s still the most common and widely used format. To cover common real world scenarios, we’re going to perform 3 compress and 2 extract tests for each archiver, there are two main sets of results.

Here we put 15 file archivers to the test to see which ones have the best compression rate plus the fastest speed. There are many claims made about who’s fastest or offers the best compression rate, but you will never know who’s right until they’ve been tried out. Many software archivers come with their own features but in the end what’s still important is the speed at which files can be compressed or extracted and the output size of the compressed file. ZIP archive compression is the only one which is natively supported out of the box by Windows, but like the copy function in Windows, there are better and faster alternatives.įor more serious compression needs, dedicated archiver software that can handle ZIP or other better formats may be required. Of course, there are many file compression formats around besides ZIP, others such as RAR and 7z are also very well known. Living in the internet age, it’s beneficial if a file can be compressed to half its size before you upload or download it, this can save bandwidth and time. Unlike JPG or MP3, ZIP is an archive format which allows you to store several files and also folders inside a single compressed ZIP file.

One of the most popular and widely used file compression formats around today is ZIP which was developed by PKWare in 1989.

Whether it’s game discs, Windows install discs, webpages, music, video, images, internet downloads or setup installers, most files are shrunk down from their original size to reduce the storage space they consume. Just about everything that gets stored electronically nowadays is compressed in some form or another.

Free software to unzip files