WinRAR Professional

About WinRAR Professional

WinRAR is on almost every working Windows machine for one plain reason: it opens whatever arrives. RAR, ZIP, 7Z, TAR, GZ, ISO, CAB, ARJ and a long tail of older formats all extract without hunting for a specific tool, and the shell integration means it happens from a right click rather than from an application window.

On the writing side it produces RAR and ZIP. The RAR format is where the useful features live: solid compression that treats a set of similar files as one stream and compresses far better because of it, recovery records that repair an archive damaged in transit, and volume splitting that breaks a large archive into parts sized for a specific medium or upload limit.

Encryption is AES-256 applied to both file data and, optionally, the file name list, so an encrypted archive does not leak its contents through the directory. This is genuinely strong, which is worth knowing in both directions: a forgotten passphrase on an encrypted archive is not recoverable.

The rest is small conveniences that add up over years: a repair command for broken archives, test before extraction, per-profile compression settings, command line support for scripting backups, and a benchmark that tells you honestly whether the processor is the bottleneck.

What is included in this build

• Extracts RAR, ZIP, 7Z, TAR, GZ, ISO, CAB, ARJ and many legacy formats
• Creates RAR and ZIP archives with fine grained compression control
• Solid compression for much smaller archives across sets of similar files
• Recovery records that repair archives damaged during transfer
• Volume splitting into parts sized for a specific medium or upload limit
• AES-256 encryption covering file data and optionally the file name list
• Shell integration for compress and extract straight from a right click
• Command line interface for scripted backup and packaging tasks

Changed in version 7.23

• Improved extraction speed on large solid archives
• Better handling of archives with unusual character encodings in file names
• Additional format detection for older container types
• Shell menu behaviour corrected on current Windows 11 builds
• Reduced memory use when testing very large archives

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Close any open archive windows before starting.
2. Run the installer as administrator.
3. Choose which file types to associate on the setup screen.
4. Enable the shell context menu entries if they are wanted.
5. Set a default compression profile from the options panel afterwards.

System requirements and file details

Frequently asked about this title