The PeaZip’s interface is considered to be well-designed, as well as user-friendly, but much care must be taken by the user when this utility is being installed as it has the tendency to install the AVG Security Toolbar and alter the user’s homepage and search functions into AVG Secure Search with the default settings. The PeaZip is capable of reading RAR files, however it cannot write them. It is a great upgrade from 7-zip for those who want a change.The PeaZip is a free ZIP files utility which provides a unified, portable cross-platform file and archive manager GUI for several of the Open Source technologies like the FreeArc, UPX, 7-Zip and PAQ. But, I think PeaZip is not meant to be a Pro Archiver, but one for beginners and intermediate users. The other advance users who are looking for the tools not offered by PeaZip may have to buy a Pro Zip software.

Overall PeaZip is enough for the common user who just wants to compress and extract archives, and may have more than enough tools for them. I also notice that PeaZip is a bit slow when opening up an archive, about 1-2 seconds slower than 7-zip, but this is just being picky. The only downside of PeaZip are that some other tools are missing such as email, uploading and repair archive. The toolbar looks nice with buttons for the common functions. The layout is easy to understand and can be changed. It also has a variety of tools splitjoin, secure password, scheduler, ChecksumHash check, CRC check, convert archive, secure delete and more. It claims to support opening 150+ extensions and can compress to all the common type archives, mainly 7-zip, ZIP, ARC, TAR, ISO, but of course not RAR. PeaZip is probably the only open-source alternative to 7-zip that is worth using. Since 7-zip has not been updated recently(last stable:2010), I wanted to change to a new zip/compress tool.

Download peazip