Considered to be the third most widely used and best reputed file compression software, PeaZip is actually at the very top of the open-source/free file compression software list. This tool can read and extract nearly all existing archive file formats and create new compressed files both in its own format (PEA) and in some of the most common ones, ZIP and 7Z included.
Why PeaZip appears below WinZip and WinRAR on the above-mentioned list is simply beyond me. Those two not only ask for a license fee to unleash their full potential, but they also lack the functionality that PeaZip offers you for free. They are all secure, efficient, and reliable, but, amazingly, some users still prefer to pay for roughly the same functions they could enjoy free of charge. If curious, you can take a look at some of the benchmark tests available, and you’ll find that PeaZip can compress and decompress a ZIP file faster than WinZip itself...
PeaZip has been around since 2006, and it is considered by experts to be the file compression tool with the best file support rate. It is, by far, the program that can read and open more archive formats – over 150, a figure that no paid or free competitor can beat. It can also create ZIP, 7Z, ARC, TAR, and WIM archives (among others), and offers you its own high-quality compression algorithm and format, PEA, with AES256 EAX authenticated encryption. All the most highly rated encryption standards are supported for 7Z, ZIP, ARC, and PEA files, and even for RAR if it happens to be installed on your system. And the great thing is that being an open-source development, PeaZip improves its numbers on every iteration, especially regarding processing speeds and RAM usage.
What I love about PeaZip is that on top of performing as the high-end compression tool that it is, it comes with a plethora of other utilities. And I’m not referring just to PeaUtils, useful as this set of tools is, but to its archive converter, its password manager, its secure random password creator, its archive analyzer, its duplicate file finder, its file splitter and joiner, etc. The list is too long to reproduce here, so – being a free tool – I’ll leave the rest for you to discover.
PeaZip is, undoubtedly, everything you need to open and create archive files with the best compression algorithms and the highest level of security. And if that is not enough to make you download and install it on your desktop, think of the wealth of other utilities and features that come with it at no cost whatsoever.
v8.2 [Sep 12, 2021]
- PeaZip 8.2.0 improves command line usage with updated archiving and extraction switches, and introduces (peazip)/res/batch folder which contains sample scripts and system integration files (SendTo and freedesktop_integration folders are moved here).
- The archive manager is now capable of optionally displaying compression/encryption method, and modified, created, accessed timestamps for each item in archive, and to display number of items contained in each folder.
- It is now possible to chose to keep extracted files even in case errors occurred during the extraction, and working with spanned files was improved.
- Smart extraction is now available as default action to take at program's startup, alongside Open, Open as archive, Extract (full), Extract here.
- This release focuses on improving user experience on Linux systems, updating installers, improving the automatic configuration of applications for "open with" actions, and displaying more system's paths in the file manager.
- Backend were updated to Brotli 1.0.9 (Linux).
- A total of 225 file extensions can now be managed by PeaZip, with addition of .apkm, .apks, and .aab Android package formats, and of Lzip .lz (on Linux versions only).
- Translations are available in over than 30 languages, any help is welcome to translate PeaZip to new languages and to maintain current localizations up to date, so please consider taking the time to give a look to translations directory for newer language files and for any resource useful for translators.
