The only issue with programs like 7-ZIP and WinRAR, both of which did the best in compression, is that they use proprietary formats that are not fully supported on other systems. So should you go out and get 7-ZIP to zip your files? It depends. 7-Zip has been around for a while and they have ranked at the very top for best compression utility on multiple third-party tests, so the numbers are not really surprising. Well, in terms of just compression ability, 7-Zip is the clear winner.

In addition to the built-in Windows 7 compression, I’m also going to run the same set of data on Windows 10 to see if there is any difference between the versions of Windows. I’m using a Windows 7 PC with Service Pack 1 and I installed the latest versions of each program as of the date of this post: 7-Zip 15.09 beta (64-bit), WinZip version 20 and WinRAR 圆4 5.30 beta 6. In my case, I took 1.47 GBs of videos (different formats), images (RAW and other formats), documents (PDF, Office files, etc) and music files (MP3, M4A, etc) and passed them through each compression utility with default settings.įirst, let’s start with the setup I have and the versions. I don’t like just compressing images or just compressing documents because the differences end up being very small and it’s hard to choose a clear winner. For my tests, I decided to create a test folder with a bunch of data in various formats. Real World Compression Testįirst, let’s just look at straight compression numbers because that’s always fun. Beyond these four, there are many other options, but I found these to be the most popular and well known by most people.

In this article, I’ll go through four different compression tools and try to give you the advantages and disadvantages for each.

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