Convert RAR to 7Z
Free online converter for RAR files. High-ratio archive from the 7-Zip project. Nothing to install, no watermark, and every file is deleted automatically.
Drag and drop your files
or
Upload a RAR file to convert it to 7Z. Up to 3 files at once, 100 MB each.
Free · up to 3 files · 100 MB each · files deleted automatically after 1 hour.
About RAR and 7Z
RAR .rar
A proprietary archive format from WinRAR. Its compression is good and its recovery records are genuinely useful, but only its owner licenses the ability to create one.
Good for
- Strong compression with optional recovery records
- Handles multi-volume splitting well
- Common in older download archives
Trade-offs
- Proprietary — creating RAR files requires licensed software
- We can extract from RAR but cannot produce it
- Needs extra software on most systems
application/vnd.rar
7Z .7z
The high-compression archive format, using LZMA. It routinely produces the smallest file of anything here, at the cost of time and memory.
Good for
- The best compression ratios available here
- Strong AES-256 encryption
- Solid mode compresses similar files together very effectively
Trade-offs
- Needs software installed on Windows and macOS
- Slow to compress, and memory-hungry
- Less universal than ZIP for sending to other people
application/x-7z-compressed
RAR and 7Z side by side
| RAR | 7Z | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Proprietary | Solid (LZMA) |
| Typically used for | Opening archives someone else sent you | Maximum compression, long-term storage |
What changes when you convert RAR to 7Z
The archive is rebuilt, not renamed
Your RAR is unpacked in full and its contents are written into a new 7Z. Nothing is passed through untouched, so the compression is done again from scratch at the level you choose, and the resulting size depends on that setting rather than on how the RAR was originally made. The folder structure inside is preserved exactly.
These two store files differently
RAR uses a proprietary algorithm no open tool may write, so random access within the archive. 7Z compresses with LZMA, usually the tightest of these formats, so supports random access, though at a higher cost to decompress. That difference is the real reason to pick one over the other: per-file compression lets a tool pull out a single entry cheaply, while compressing everything as one stream finds patterns across files and usually ends up smaller.
Why RAR is read-only here
RAR's compression is proprietary: it may be read freely but not written by open tools, so we can unpack a RAR and give you the contents in an open format, and cannot produce one. That is a licensing boundary rather than a technical one.
You choose how hard it compresses
Because the archive is built again from scratch, the compression level is yours to set rather than inherited from the RAR. It defaults to 6 — the setting that has been the sensible middle ground for deflate for thirty years. Raising it buys a few percent for a disproportionate amount of time; lowering it is worth doing for large archives of already-compressed material such as photographs or video, where there is nothing left to squeeze.