WinZip Review !

WinZip is one of the original archivers and has been around for over 20 years, slowly adding more functions and features to the program as it evolves. It can still only compress to ZIP or ZIPX formats (XZ method is new for v18), but just about all the well known formats can be extracted including 7z, ISO, RAR, IMG and CAB. To make up for the lack of compression options, WinZip has other features such as uploading directly to media, the cloud and social networks, convert files to PDF, archive preview, image converter and an auto backup function. Watch for the adware during install.

Version tested: 18.0
Omni.ja Support: Yes
Price: €29.95
Max Compression used: ZIPX XZ

Some archivers you may know of were not tested for various reasons.

• ZipGenius has never been updated to fix a known issue which renders the right click context menu useless and in many cases crashes Explorer.


• IZArc has gained a bad reputation of being bundled with adware and also appears to offer some you cannot opt out of. FuzeZip and jZip are other archiving tools with issues relating to adware.


• Development seems to have stopped for StuffIt, KGB Archiver and TUGZip, none have been updated since 2009 or earlier. WinUHA has not been updated since 2005, UHARC not since 2007.