There are some clues:

https://x.com/WinRAR_RARLAB/status/1703723906945691890

Most of their revenue comes from corporate licenses.

win.rar GmbH is a German corporation and as such is required to post their financial statements to the federal "Handelsregister". If you google the exact company name, you'll quickly find the Northdata site for them (Northdata is a crawler that aggregates Handelsregister data) [1]. According to that, they made ~1M€ in earnings in 2023.

[1] https://www.northdata.com

If you use it or have it installed after 30 days without a buying, your company has violated the terms of the license.

WinRAR has a lot of great features as an archiver and compressor. It can create parity archives, and has a lot of other great features if you look at the manual

Granted it doesn’t have compression advantage over 7z, but those flags and features look great when I want to create archives, generally better and more convenient than anything else I look at, but I usually end up going with plain old zip files since various utilities can scan and search through them, etc., a network effect win for the zip format. But it also underscores that the best compression ratio doesn’t count for that much for me and some other people

"Best" doesn't always win. We'd be sporting PalmOS if that were the case.

The difference in compression isn't that big. Just ran a test on some random 1GB plain-text file I had lying around. Both on the highest compression level at a dictionary size that uses about 5.5GB of RAM to compress (since that's what 128MB dictionary size uses in 7zip, the Winrar equivalent are 916MB, more than what's useful for this file). The result was 7zip compressing the file down to 225MB in 9 minutes and WinRAR compressing it to 239MB in 2 minutes. That's a 6% difference, at a considerable speed cost.

Not a scientific benchmark, but I think it underlines general point. If I want the best results I use a .tar.xz at insane compression levels, or more commonly a .tar.zstd if I want good decompression speed. The usecase for 7zip and WinRar is convenience, ease of use and windows-native file handling instead of the unix-focused .tar format. WinRar wins out on all three of those.

7zip's gui is a worse clone of WinRar's, archive creation has a fraction of the features, windows-specific file handling is an afterthought at best (winrar has handling for the archive flag, alternate data streams, file security, hard links, etc). And most important of all rar is built as an archive format. You get built-in recovery records, and hashes are stored as blake2 hashes instead of the frankly insufficient crc32 hashes 7zip uses.

I'd give 7zip points if it had a better (== more familiar) CLI, but they made the bizarre decision to copy winrar's cli too and make even worse documentation for it. The only things it has going for it are a linux UI and the open-source license

Same for MS-DOS, at least in the early years. Microsoft was completely aware just how often it was pirated, even by businesses, but just cared more about market share.

What do you miss? The ability to view an archive's contents without having to extract it first, and extract individual files? That can be achieved with BetterZip:

https://macitbetter.com

BetterZip also comes with a Quick Look plugin.

> The other one is Total Commander...

Check out Transmit by Panic. It's technically a remote file transfer software, but can also be used for the local filesystem.

https://panic.com/transmit

I had the same thought when i switched to Linux a few years ago - then i realized i can just run them under Wine :-P.

Though over time i switched to using Double Commander, an open source Total Commander clone written in Lazarus / Free Pascal, more than Total Commander itself since it runs natively on Linux and can do things like running programs such as xterm, but i still keep Total Commander installed since it can do some things better (or at least in a more familiar manner).

My default archiver is still WinRAR though.

I use Commander One (https://commander-one.com/) on MacOS as a Total Commander replacement and it's good enough.

There's also a free version with a few features restricted here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/commander-one-file-manager/id1...