One perk of being a reviewer is that I occasionally get unsolicited bits of whatever from people fishing for new reviews. And last week, out of the blue, the WinZip people sent me a magic code to unlock the latest version of WinZip Pro in the hopes that I'd give 'em a shout-out for the site. And since I'm a longtime user of PowerArchiver, I decided to put together a little head-to-head.
First off, I must say that both products are top-notch and do a great job of opening and saving to all of the popular archive formats as well as a lot of the unpopular ones. I could probably go point-by-point into all of the formats they support, but the list would be about 95% the same, and the 5% of difference would be formats that are obscure or abandoned and would only be useful if you found something on an old floppy disk from the 1980's that you needed to open. If you're doing ZIP or RAR or 7Z or GZ or any other popular file format, these will do the job just fine.
As for interface and OS-interoperability, again they're largely the same. Here's a shot of WinZip opening a ZIP file with some folders in it.
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If you've ever used WinZip, this should be familiar. At the top is one big toolbar of oversized buttons to do common tasks. There's one "tree" pane on the left showing any folder structure in the ZIP. And there's a big pane on the right showing anything in the folder. Like the standard Windows explorer, you can view your stuff as thumbnails or small icons or as a spreadsheet-ish view with all of the details. WinZip also groks a few thumbnail formats, which is why you see the archived PNG and BMP files as thumbnail-ed bitmaps.
Here's PowerArchiver opening the same file.
(click to embiggen)
One thing that PowerArchiver added recently is a new UI that looks and acts a lot (and by "a lot" I mean "exactly" ) like Office 2007 with toolbar buttons organized into tabs and groups. It gives you a bit more functionality than WinZip's single row of buttons, but it's really a matter of taste. If you find the new Office 2007 interface offensive, you can switch back to a "classic" mode that looks quite a bit like WinZip with a single bar of buttons at the top. The classic interface is skinnable with a bunch of downloadable skins on the site, but the standard one looks just fine.
As far as the panes, it's very similar to WinZip. The only difference is that the thumbnails view doesn't show the actual bitmaps, but instead shows 'em in a preview pane on the far right. It's not quite as cool as the WinZip one, but the preview pane does show a lot of formats that don't work well as thumbnails, like XML, PDF, etc.
As far as function goes, the programs are about 95% the same. They both have tendrils that go into Windows Explorer so you can easily create ZIP files by just right-clicking on files on the desktop or in an Explorer window. They both come with the very similar ability to make standalone self-exploding EXE files. WinZip does have an apparently much more fully featured ZIP-to-EXE program that you can buy for an extra $50, but the one that comes with it is just fine for my purposes.
Both programs also have the ability (in the "pro" version) to burn ZIP files directly to CD/DVD media from within the program. PowerArchiver's burn option is nicer than WinZip's, but since every version of Windows since XP has had the ability to burn CD's directly from within Windows Explorer, this isn't really much of an advantage. If I want to put a ZIP file on a CD, I'll likely just do it from Explorer rather than from within my archive program.
Both products have command-line versions available for registered users. Again, this isn't much of an advantage, as command-line compression tools are plentiful and free.
Both products come in "standard" and "pro" flavors and, interestingly, the differences between the standard and pro in both products are the same. The Pro version gives you the disk-burning function as well as the ability to FTP from within the product and the ability to put archiving on a schedule so you can use PowerArchiver/WinZip as a compressed backup program, perhaps compressing and copying/uploading your archive to a remote server on a schedule. Another slight edge to PowerArchiver Pro is that it can create ISO files and mount them as virtual drives from within the program. WinZip can read and extract from ISO files but can't create them or mount them as drives.
Price and update-wise, I again have to give the edge to PowerArchiver. PowerArchiver is $23 for the standard edition and $35 for the pro edition (currently on sale for $31) and includes lifetime upgrades to major (full version number) and minor (bugfix) versions. WinZip is $30 for standard and $50 for pro. Their upgrade policy isn't clear, but it appears to only cover minor upgrades. They have an "upgrade assurance plan" for $7 a year which covers major and minor upgrades.
Conclusion
If you read the stuff above, it's clear that I'm giving the edge to PowerArchiver, but it's not a very big edge. PowerArchiver did a few small things better and has a much better price and upgrade policy. That's not to say WinZip isn't a good product. In fact, both products are excellent, and if you already own one you shouldn't feel the pull to "cross-grade" to the other.
It rather reminds me of the old "WordPerfect vs Word" war of the 1980's and 90's. Seemed like whenever one program came out with new features, the other would put out an upgrade leapfrogging those features. That war didn't end until WordPerfect was late to the "now available for Windows" party, but the bottom line was that in that competition the consumer ended up the winner.
And the same is the case now. WinZip and PowerArchiver are two top-drawer commercial archiving programs, and the war between 'em is making us the winner.
And finally, yes I know that there are a bazillion free ZIP utilities out there. I've tried quite a few of 'em, and I have yet to find one that's nearly as nice as these two. Neither WinZip nor PowerArchiver are emptying your wallet with their prices. Chances are good that you have to deal with archive files now and then, and these can really save you some time and frustration.
So get one. You'll thank me for it.
