The Unarchiver for Mac, a free download, is an upgrade over the built-in compression tool. Read our review here.
The standard compression utility in OS X on Mac is good, but its functionality is limited. That’s why we took a closer look at The Unarchiver, which is both free and open-source. The tool supports a long list of archive formats, including ZIP, RAR, 7z, TAR, GZIP and more, which you can read more about here.
In short, the tool works as expected, and installation involves (ironically) extracting the ZIP file to your Applications folder. To unpack a file, just click it as you normally would. Other useful features in The Unarchiver include extracting an archive to a different folder or destination on your computer.
In our tests, we noticed that The Unarchiver took about a second longer to unpack the installer folder compared to the default tool. We didn’t try larger files, so it may be worth a closer look if you often work with very large archives.
Personally, I haven’t used many of these utilities on Mac, but because The Unarchiver is a fantastic, open-source, and free improvement over the built-in compression tool, we recommend it to all our users. The Unarchiver is also available in the Mac App Store.
Download The Unarchiver for Mac
