Best GNU tar Alternatives in 2026
Taken from File Compression Software, where GNU tar is listed too, in the same order.
- 1 8.2 Club score
Keka
Keka is a cloud HR and payroll platform covering employee administration, hiring, onboarding, attendance, performance, and project operations.
- Free plan
- Open source
- macOS · Web · iPhone and iPad · Android
- 2 8.0 Club score
B1 Archiver
B1 Free Archiver creates and extracts archives on Windows, Linux, macOS and Android, and also offers an online archiver.
- Free plan
- Windows · macOS · Linux · Web
- 3 7.8 Club score
PowerISO
PowerISO handles disc burning and imaging, archive and image-file processing, virtual drives, and bootable USB creation.
- Free plan
- Windows · macOS · Linux
- 4
7.7 Club scorePowerArchiver
PowerArchiver is an archive utility for compressing, creating, extracting, and managing more than 60 formats, including ZIP, 7Z, RAR, TAR, ISO, and CAB.
- Free plan
- Windows · macOS
- 5 7.7 Club score
Zstandard
Zstandard is a free, lossless compression algorithm for real-time workloads.
- Free plan
- Windows · macOS · Linux · API
- 6
7.6 Club scoreBandizip
Bandizip is a file archiver for Windows and macOS that creates compressed files and extracts existing archives.
- Free plan
- Windows · macOS
- 7 7.6 Club score
XZ Utils
- Free plan
- Windows · macOS · Linux
- 8 7.6 Club score
lzip
- Free plan
- Windows · macOS · Linux · Self-hosted
- 9 7.5 Club score
WinRAR
WinRAR is a compression tool for creating and organizing archives across a wide range of formats, including RAR, ZIP, CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZip, UUE, ISO, BZIP2, Z, and…
- Free trial
- Windows · macOS · Linux · Android
- 10 7.5 Club score
PeaZip
PeaZip is a free file archiver and archive manager for Linux, macOS, Windows, and BSD.
- Free plan
- Windows · macOS · Linux
- 11 7.5 Club score
FileOptimizer
FileOptimizer is a free Windows program that recompresses already-compressed files to reduce their size while preserving their format and behavior.
- Free plan
- Windows
- 12
7.5 Club scoreWinZip PDF Pro
WinZip PDF Pro is Windows software for reading, editing, organizing, converting, signing, and protecting PDFs.
- Free plan
- Windows
- 13 7.4 Club score
- 14 7.4 Club score
ALZip
ALZip is a file compression and extraction program from ESTsoft, with a free personal plan for qualifying domestic individual users who use it for noncommercial purposes.
- Free plan
- Windows · Linux · Android
- 15
7.3 Club scoreNanaZip
NanaZip is a free, open-source file archiver derived from 7-Zip and made for Windows.
- Free plan
- Windows
- 16
7.2 Club scoreThe Unarchiver
The Unarchiver is a free macOS app for opening archive files and extracting their contents.
- Free plan
- Windows · macOS · Linux
- 17
7.2 Club scoreArk
Ark is KDE’s graphical utility for creating, browsing, extracting and modifying compressed files and archives.
- Free plan
- Windows · Linux
- 18
7.0 Club scorebzip2
bzip2 is a free data compressor for creating and reading compressed files on Linux, Windows, Unix, and Win32 systems.
- Free plan
- Windows · Linux
- 19 7.0 Club score
lrzip
lrzip is a free command-line utility for compressing large files, generally those above 10–50 MB.
- Free plan
- macOS · Linux · Self-hosted
- 20 7.0 Club score
8 Zip
8 Zip is a Windows 10 file archiver from Finebits OÜ, based in Tallinn, Estonia.
- Free plan
- Windows