WinRAR Review

A product by win.rar GmbH

Overview

WinRAR is a compression and archiving program released first time in 1995. Is associated with .rar extension, one of the most popular archiving extensions along with .zip. Almost all archiving programs can extract .rar archives, but only a few can create .rar archives because the license for this file format is paid.

WinRAR is a fast extractor, but is a pretty low speed compressor (time to create an archive). It doesn't supports many compression formats, but can extract all popular ones.

Compression Speed
4.39/10

The program isn't very fast when you create new archives.

Compare Compression Speed (higher is better choice)
WinRAR
8.39
8.10
7.13
4.87
4.85
4.39
4.23
3.17
2.94
2.41

Extraction Speed
8.39/10

Is very good at speed of extraction. You can drag and drop an archive over a folder keeping pressed the right click and WinRAR will know what do you want to do prompting you extraction menu.

Compare Extraction Speed (higher is better choice)
WinRAR
10
8.63
8.39
8.36
6.75
6.65
6.52
6.26
6.15
3.51

Compression Formats
2.42/10

It can create just a few types of archives: rar, rar5 and zip. Indeed, these are the most used ones, but is missing the .7z archive (is the best archiving format to reduce file size - see our test).

Compare Compression Formats (higher is better choice)
7.78
6.41
6.27
6.01
5.23
5.16
5.10
4.90
4.77
3.99
* WinRAR in not included in the above chart because is weaker than these competitors

Extraction Formats
7.36/10

Is able to extract a wide range of archives and this time it has support for .7z.

Compare Extraction Formats (higher is better choice)
WinRAR
9.09
8.36
7.58
7.56
7.50
7.44
7.42
7.39
7.36
7.35

Features
10/10

The program it has many features and interface is very intuitive. You can create different profiles with different settings, choose between different compression methods, split an archive in multiple parts based on size (B, KB, MB, GB), create SFX self extracting archives (archive as .exe) and test archived files against errors.

You can set it to shut down computer when archive is completed (useful for huge archives), set password, lock archives (to prevent accidental modifications of their content).

It displays the properties of an archive (number of files, size, packed size, compression ratio) and is able to repair corrupted archives.

Includes a Wizard mode with step by step instructions - useful for beginners, to create or extract archives.

Compare Features (higher is better choice)
WinRAR
10
10
8.89
8.89
8.89
7.78
7.78
6.67
6.67
5.56

Pro

  • is working fast with large number of files or huge archives
  • save custom profiles with different settings
  • extract files from .tar.gz from the first operation (other programs first will extract the TAR archive from TAR.GZ, then you need to extract again from TAR )
  • easy to use interface

Cons

  • cannot create .7z archives
  • able to create just a few types of archives

Conclusion
6.44/10

Is a full featured program, very intuitive to use, ideal to create .rar (and .zip) archives, it has a very good extraction speed, but lacks at compression formats and compression speed.

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