I always hear WinRar is so good, then WinZip is best, peazip is best... Well in the real world it's 7zip! I need something with great compression I DON'T care if it's pretty! So I took a few folders and compressed them using the best compression each program offered. Using the 64bit versions if they had them.
7zip 64bit, WinRar 64bit, PeaZip 64bit.

Updated compression tests with a larger folder and file sizes. 
7zip 64 bitversion 16.04 64bit http://www.7-zip.org 
WinRar 64 bit version 5.50 64bit https://www.win-rar.com 
Winzip 32 bit version 22 32bit - 21 trial http://www.winzip.com
PeaZip 64 bit version 6.5.0 64bit http://www.peazip.org 

01-08-2018 original file size on disk 5.07 GB or 5,446,914,048 bytes, 8546 Files, 1,775 folders.
7zip...........4.41GB.....time 03:32 minutes .7z (Ultra) (Dictionary size 32 MB 4.55GB - 2:07)
7zip...........5.05GB.....time 00:07 minutes .tar
7zip...........4.67GB.....time 01:22 minutes .zip
PeaZip.......5.05GB.....time 00:07 minutes .tar
PeaZip.......4.67GB.....time 04:31 minutes .pea
PeaZip.......4.67GB.....time 01:07 minutes .zip
WinRar.......4.62GB.....time 02:24 minutes .rar (Best - Dictionary size 32 MB)
WinRar.......4.62GB.....time 01:38 minutes .rar (rar5 Best - Dictionary size 32 MB)
WinRar.......4.67GB.....time 02:10 minutes .zip
WinZip 22..4.66GB.....time 01:20 minutes .zip
Windows zip...Still fails the compression because of file names.

I did this one January 1 2017 and 7zip was clearly the winner!
Original size 2.70 GB 28177 files in the folders.
7zip................. 2.078GB.....time 2:02 minutes .7z
7zip................. 2.85GB.......time 0:01 minutes .tar
7zip................. 2.78GB.......time 1:26 minutes .zip
PeaZip............. 2.85GB.......time 0:05 minutes .tar
PeaZip............. 2.5GB.........time 4:44 minutes .tar.bz2
PeaZip............. 2.78GB.......time 1:30 minutes .zip
WinRar............ 2.78GB.......time 1:22 minutes .rar
WinRar............ 2.78GB.......time 2:04 minutes .rar (rar5)
WinRar............ 2.79GB.......time 4:24 minutes .zip
WinZip21........Error log not enough memory. With 25+GB's of free memory.
Windows zip...Can not do the compression because of file names.

7zip is still the winner! So I know a few people don't like the GUI but it's simple, fast and gets the job done!
And it's 100% free plus it will open any .zip, .rar, .7z, .gzip, .deb, .tar .exe... every file.

I think the worst on the list is WinZip it installs services that run in the background which I just DON'T like and it's way over priced!

I would rate them like this:
1. 7zip
2. WinRar
3. PeaZip
4. Windows built-in zip
5. WinZip

WinRar, Peazip and WinZip have made some nice jumps this year but still not as good as 7zip and 7zip is still 100% free! 

This post was edited by beastusa at January 8, 2018 6:21 PM PST

RAR generally gets better compression than ZIP, but ZIP is free and open source. Both RAR and ZIP use LZ77 compression, which has the property of decompressing very fast. ZIP uses a straightforward structured format to store files. Each file is individually compressed using DEFLATE or another more modern compression algorithm. (Recent versions of PKZIP support LZMA and several others.) Then, each compressed file is appended to the ZIP file, and a directory that lists the files and their locations in the archive is appended to the end. WinRAR has a trial period and eventually you pay for it.
7-zip, I believe has a free version and a paid version.

Delma did you read my post? 7zip has the best compression, almost twice as fast and is 100% free the only way you pay is donation. I uninstalled winrar, winzip after the testing they were junk with good marketing. You know like owning an iPhone pay top dollar for garbage? I have no idea how people get duped by marketing all the time.

It's not real hard to do it yourself.
1. Install them all.
2. Grab some radom files start compressing.
3 Compare results not their ads about how great they are and not what their fan boys say.

WinZip and WinRar are very bloated, slow and you get bigger files then you started with! The idea behind compressing files is one of two things. One save space or two encyrpt but when it's takes longer and uses more space why would you ever do that?
This post was edited by beastusa at April 8, 2023 6:08 PM PDT