Bandizip is a Lightweight, Feature Rich, Versatile Archiving Tool - A Review

If you are looking for a feature-rich freeware alternative of WinZip, WinRAR, PowerArchiver, WinArchiver etc, I should introduce you with Bandizip from Bandisoft.
Bandizip is a freeware, multilingual archive manager for Windows that can handle multiple archive formats including ZipX. It has many features including Fast Drag and Drop, High Speed Archiving, and Multi-core compression, File Search in Archive, Archive Error Check, Support for Self Extracting Archive (SFX), Splitted Archive Volumes, Support for Unicode filenames (UTF-8), eye-catching icon-packs.

Features & Specifications

Bandizip can be downloaded from the following link [3.61 Mb]. Installer is digitally signed by Bandisoft and is free of malware.

http://www.bandicam.com/bandizip/downloads/bandizip-setup-gl.exe

Portable version is also available.

www.bandicam.com/bandizip/downloads/bandizip-portable-en.zip

Installation is clean & very fast. Desktop icon is created automatically.

Bandizip is free to use at both home and in the office.
The software is multilingual: 23 languages are supported.
Bandizip is also available for Macintosh as a paid version ($1.99). Mac OS X 10.6 or later are supported. Macintosh version supports English, Korean languages.It is available on Mac App Store.
The software creates a link to create New Folder from Right Click Menu in a folder.

The software also registers to the context menu of Files, Folders & Archives. Context Menu may also be set to show in cascaded manner.

In the right-click menu of an archive file, there is 'Extract Automatically' menu. After choosing that option, if there is only one file/folder in an archive, it will extract to 'Current Folder'. In other cases, it will create a new folder and extract files to 'Created Folder'.
An optional 'Preview Archive' feature is available in archive context menu.

The software GUI is easy to follow and is resizable.

Bandizip can handle following file associations.

Bandizip can read and extract the following archive types:

RAR(part1.rar, r01), ACE, ALZ, APK, ARJ, BH, BZ, BZ2, CAB, EGG, GZ, J2J, JAR, IMG, IPA, ISO, LHA, LZH, LZMA, PMA, TBZ, TBZ2, TGZ, TLZ, TXZ, UDF, WAR, WIM, XZ, and Z.

New archive can be created in the following format:

Zip(z01), ZipX(zx01), TAR, TGZ, 7Z(7z.001), and EXE(e01).

It create or extract multiple zip files simultaneously from windows explorer

Extraction Progress

Compression Progress

Bandizip can Create and Extract ZipX files for free.
It can easily create Self Extracting Archive (SFX). You can set the following settings for that.

Password protected / Encrypted archives can be created using ZipCrypto and AES 256 algorithms, but Name Encryption is not yet supported.

New Archive Creation Dialogue

Created archives may be slitted into multiple volumes of custom size or of available size presets.

The software supports four types of compression levels.

Bandizip supports 'High Speed Archiving'.

When you archive multimedia files (AVI, WMV, MKV...) or archived files (ZIP, RAR, 7Z...), you can't get good compression results. These files are hard to compress and sometimes the file size could be bigger than the original one. Bandizip knows this concept, so when it tries to compress files, Bandizip will judge that the files are not going to be compressed anymore. Then, it will bypass the file.

It can use Multi-core processor for compression tasks. This option will be automatically checked in more than a triple-core processor or greater and will be automatically unchecked in a single or dual-core processor. This will make the compression significantly faster in those systems.

The software supports Unicode to display international characters which display for filenames in archives.
During extraction of archives, Bandizip can use 'Fast Drag & Drop' function for large archives. This means that it will then skip extracting files to temporary folder first and just extracts to the targeted folder directly.

The software supports a feature to Find Files in Archive.

Bandizip can Check Archives for Errors.

The software supports command line operation. See here & here for instructions.
The software can automatically check for major & minor software updates.
The software normally have just one type of icons but other icon packs can be downloaded and used.
The software lacks any detailed offline or online help documentation but some important features are explained in online documentations.
Under default settings in Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit, the software consumes negligible system resources at idle time & moderately low resources during extraction & compression.

System Resource Usage at Idle Time

System Resource Usage during Compression

System Resource Usage during Extraction

Free forum support of the software is available.

My Verdict

I like the software very much and would highly recommend it. If some additional minor improvements are done, it will become one of the best products of its kind.