The Unarchiver is a free Mac archive-extraction utility by MacPaw that expands a far wider range of compressed formats than the built-in Archive Utility — including RAR, 7-zip, Zip, tar, gzip, bzip2, ISO, and many more — all with a single double-click.
What is The Unarchiver?
The Unarchiver is a dedicated decompression app for macOS that replaces Apple's default archive handler. Where macOS ships with extraction support for only a handful of formats, The Unarchiver handles dozens, making it the de-facto standard for anyone who downloads files from the wider internet rather than the walled garden of the App Store.
It lives quietly in the background, asking for very little configuration. Once you set it as the default handler for your archive types in System Settings, it simply works — you double-click a file, a progress bar blinks, and your folder appears. There is no subscription nag screen, no upsell, no toolbar injection. For a free utility, that restraint is rare and genuinely appreciated.
What does The Unarchiver do best?
Its killer feature is format breadth. I regularly pull down multi-part RAR archives from vintage software mirrors and ZIP64 files from developers who haven't noticed that zip's 4 GB file-size limit exists — The Unarchiver handles both without complaint. It also correctly decodes filenames in non-UTF-8 encodings, which is a persistent headache with archives prepared on Windows or older Linux systems. macOS's built-in extractor will silently garble Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Eastern European filenames; The Unarchiver asks which encoding to assume and gets it right.
Archive password prompts are handled gracefully — a clean dialog appears rather than a cryptic Finder error. Extraction of large archives is asynchronous, so you're never waiting for the spinning beachball to finish before you can switch back to your work.
- Supports RAR, RAR5, 7-zip, Zip, Tar, Gzip, Bzip2, XZ, Lzip, Cab, ISO, StuffIt, LZX, EXE (SFX) and more
- Correct filename decoding across dozens of legacy character sets
- Password-protected archive support with a clean prompt
- Optional automatic deletion of the source archive after extraction
- Extraction into a sub-folder (to avoid cluttering your Downloads folder)
Is The Unarchiver free?
Yes — The Unarchiver is completely free to download and use, with no feature tiers, no trial period, and no in-app purchases. MacPaw maintains the app; their commercial products (CleanMyMac X, Gemini) presumably fund the goodwill of keeping this one gratis. The Mac App Store listing has carried a 4.5-star rating from hundreds of thousands of reviews for years, which is essentially unheard of for a utility.
Who should use The Unarchiver?
Anyone on a Mac who regularly handles compressed files from outside Apple's ecosystem. That encompasses developers who download open-source archives from Linux mirrors, designers who receive layered assets in formats like .7z, power users who work with disk images or multi-part RAR sets, and even casual users who occasionally get a ZIP from a Windows-using colleague that Archive Utility refuses to open cleanly.
If your file life is 100% iCloud Drive and App Store downloads, you may never notice its absence. But the moment you hit your first RAR file, you'll want The Unarchiver already installed rather than scrambling to find it.
What are the best The Unarchiver alternatives?
The closest free alternative is Keka, which also handles RAR and 7-zip and adds compression creation to the mix — something The Unarchiver deliberately omits. Keka is donation-ware on the developer's site and paid on the Mac App Store. For pure compression-and-extraction power, BetterZip 5 offers a more visual queue-based interface and is worth considering if you work with archives daily at a professional level. Archive Utility (macOS built-in) handles ZIP and a few other common formats adequately if your needs are limited.
The Unarchiver wins on simplicity and format coverage. Keka wins if you also need to create 7-zip or Tar archives. BetterZip wins for heavy batch workflows. For most users, The Unarchiver is the right default.
