WinRAR is better as an archiving tool than 7zip. It has more features, recovery records, a much better self-extracting generator (7zip's is laughably primitive)

WinRAR is better as an archiving tool than 7zip. It has more features, recovery records, a much better self-extracting generator (7zip's is laughably primitive), more ways to compress files (e.g. compressing multiple folders into separate archives) and it is also much faster than 7zip when compressing. Also AFAIK it is the only that supports NTFS streams, though i'm not sure how often that is needed (but might be, e.g. for preserving the downloaded status of files). And very annoyingly, 7zip has had for years a race condition where when you open a file inside an archive, it extracts the file in the temporary folder and then... it deletes it before the associated application manages to load it. It is hit and miss when it works - often it does, but then for some reason i haven't figured out it just deletes the file. And related to that 7zip extracts only the file you double click on, so e.g. it doesn't extract any data files an executable might need or images or subpages an HTML file may refer to. I have both installed and in my experience WinRAR is by far the better tool when it comes to handling archives with the main exception (and the only reason i have 7zip installed) being that 7zip supports extracting from far more archive formats - including disk images (i use it all the time to extract files from VirtualBox, PCem, etc disk images and seems to support a variety of file systems too).