This is a free tool that creates archives compatible to WinZIP, 7 Zip, Win RAR, etc.

Bandizip is lightweight and free archiving software that works quite fast. This tool is compatible to WinZip, 7-Zip, WinRAR and other archive formats. In fact it supports most of the well known archiving formats such as ZIP, 7Z, RAR, ALZ, EGG, TAR, BH, LZH, GZ, BZ2, ISO, CAB, WIM, XZ, ARJ, and Z archives files. You are able to create self-extractive archives too. These are in EXE formats. Archives created by this tool can be multi-volume, split across several archives. Multimedia files such as AVI, WMV, MP3 etc are notoriously difficult to compress. Quite often you get an even bigger archive file, when trying to compress these media files. This product, Bandizip however, will give you significant compression most often.

The interface is very simple and even the first time users should be able to get going without any confusion right away. Main area in the display is used to display a list of files. The tools on the tool bar are intuitive. Drag & drop facility makes it even easier to use. The program supports Unicode file system. Thus, non-English characters in file names will be displayed properly and it will be extracted without breaking the Asia Pacific and other languages used in the archive. When archiving, the Bandizip skips files that cannot be compressed to speed up the compression process. Besides specific extract command in the interface, you could extract files with right click menu options too. You can also check the archives for errors via the Test option from the main interface. This is a nice and handy tool.