Bandizip — The Complete Guide: A Fast, Friendly Windows Archiver and What the Free Edition Includes
Bandizip from Bandisoft is a Windows archiver that pairs a tidy interface with good speed. It creates ZIP, 7Z, ZIPX, TAR, GZ, XZ and ISO archives, including self-extracting EXE files, and opens more than 30 formats such as RAR and RAR5, CAB, ARJ and ZSTD. Most of the daily work happens from the right-click menu in File Explorer, so you rarely need to open the main window at all.
Bandizip
Bandisoft
Fast Windows archiver with a clean interface: creates ZIP, 7Z and TAR and opens RAR, ISO and dozens more. Free Standard edition with ads.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Many formats — create ZIP, 7Z and TAR, open RAR, ISO and more.
- Explorer integration — compress and extract with a right-click.
- Multi-core speed — fast compression on modern multi-core CPUs.
- Encryption — password protection for archives.
- Splitting and EXE — break a large archive into parts or make a self-extracting file.
What is free and what is not
The Standard edition is free for personal and commercial use, but it shows ads. Repairing damaged archives, password recovery and the password manager are only in the paid Professional and Enterprise editions. The free edition exists for Windows only; on the Mac, Bandizip is a paid App Store app.
Related tools
Ad-free and open source — 7-Zip. The same engine with a modern Windows 11 interface — NanaZip. A cross-platform archiver with dozens of formats — PeaZip.
7-Zip
Igor Pavlov
File compression and extraction — ZIP, 7z, RAR and more, with strong compression and AES-256 encryption.
Get it from the vendor
NanaZip
M2-Team
A modern 7-Zip derivative for Windows — integrates with the Windows 11 context menu and adds formats.
Get it from the vendor
PeaZip
Giorgio Tani
Open, create and encrypt archives in 200+ formats, including splitting large model files.
Get it from the vendor
7-Zip-zstd
Tino Reichardt (mcmilk) and contributors
7-Zip build for Windows with extra codecs — Zstandard, Brotli, LZ4 and Lizard — for very fast compression of large data sets.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Bandizip is a quick, comfortable way to send and receive bundles of drawings and reports. If the ads bother you, pick one of the open-source alternatives.