This article compares several notable file archiver utilities. Unless otherwise noted, comparisons are for full release versions (not prerelease) and for installations without extra aspects such as add-ons, extensions or external programs.
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The following table identifies the operating systems that archivers can run on directly without emulation or a compatibility layer.
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The following table indicates which archivers implement various archiver features natively without third-party add-ons.
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The following table identifies the archive formats that each archiver can read. Note that gzip, bzip2 and xz are compression formats rather than archive formats.
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The following table identifies the archive formats that each archiver can write and create. Note that gzip, bzip2 and xz are compression formats rather than archive formats.
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PeaZip has full support for Brotli, Zstandard, various LPAQ and PAQ formats, QUAD / BALZ / BCM (highly efficient ROLZ based compressors), FreeArc format, and for its native PEA format.
7-Zip includes read support for .msi, cpio and xar, plus Apple's dmg/HFS disk images and the deb/.rpm package distribution formats; beta versions (9.07 onwards) have full support for the LZMA2-compressed .xz format.