Although ZIP is now regarded as the standard unified format for archive management, it is inevitable that you’ll receive a file archived in another format that you either can’t open within either Windows or Mac, or isn’t supported by your existing management tool.

There are plenty of alternatives available on the market, many of them free. PeaZip is one of the better and more popular archive management tools. As well as supporting the standard ZIP format, it also enables you to create archives using the newer 7z format, which main advantage is to save additional space. Archives in the 7z format can be up to 30% better compressed than ZIP and also much quicker to open on a slow computer.

PeaZip will also enable you to open an archive in just about every other format, including RAR. It doesn’t support the Mac-only Stuffit (.sit or .sitx) format, however, which is still in use, so you’ll need the free Stuffit expander to manage these archives.

PeaZip is a simple well-designed archive management tool for both Windows and Linux computers. There is a portable version which you can take on the road.