Keka vs The Unarchiver: Which Mac Archive Tool Should You Use?
Keka vs The Unarchiver: Which Mac Archive Tool Should You Use?
These two apps come up in the same conversation constantly, and most comparisons treat them as rivals fighting over the same job. They are not. One of them cannot do half of what the other does — and once you know which half, the choice stops being a matter of taste.
The Unarchiver opens archives. Keka opens and creates them.
Everything else — format tables, interface preferences, benchmark claims — is secondary to that. This guide covers the practical differences, where each one genuinely wins, and the thing neither of them can do for you.
The Core Difference
macOS ships with Archive Utility, which handles ZIP well enough and almost nothing else. That leaves two gaps: opening formats Apple ignores (RAR, 7z, and a long tail of older formats), and creating archives in anything other than ZIP.
The Unarchiver fills the first gap only. It is, by design, an extractor. Double-click a .rar, a .7z, a .tar.bz2, an old .sit file, and it unpacks. There is no "create archive" command, because that was never the point of the app.
Keka fills both gaps. It extracts the same broad range of formats and it compresses into 7z, ZIP, TAR, GZIP, BZIP2, XZ and more, with encryption and volume splitting on top.
So the decision tree is short:
- You only ever receive archives → The Unarchiver is sufficient, and it is the lighter install.
- You ever send archives, encrypt them, or split them → you need Keka. The Unarchiver simply cannot.
Format Support
Both apps read far more than macOS does natively. The difference shows up on the write side.
| Capability | The Unarchiver | Keka |
|---|---|---|
| Extract ZIP, 7z, TAR, GZIP, BZIP2, XZ | Yes | Yes |
| Extract RAR (incl. RAR5) | Yes | Yes |
| Extract ISO, DMG, CAB, MSI, EXE installers | Yes | Yes |
| Extract legacy formats (StuffIt, LZH, ARJ, ARC, PAX) | Yes — its strongest area | Partial |
| Create 7z / ZIP / TAR / GZIP / BZIP2 / XZ | No | Yes |
| Create DMG and ISO images | No | Yes |
| AES-256 encryption on new archives | No | Yes (7z and ZIP) |
| Split archives into volumes | No | Yes |
| Create RAR | No | No |
Two notes worth knowing:
Neither app can create RAR archives. This is not an oversight. RAR compression is proprietary, and only the format's owner ships a compressor. Every free Mac archiver can read RAR and none can write it. If someone insists on receiving a .rar, you need WinRAR itself.
The Unarchiver's legacy handling is genuinely better than the alternatives. It carries decoders for formats that predate macOS, and — more usefully in practice — it is unusually good at guessing filename text encodings in archives created on non-English Windows or classic Mac systems. If you have ever extracted a ZIP and gotten filenames full of mojibake, that is the problem The Unarchiver solves best. It exposes an encoding picker specifically for this.
Creating Archives: Where Keka Stands Alone
Keka's compression side is the entire reason to choose it, so it is worth being specific about what you get.
Format and level. Pick the output format and a compression level slider. For 7z this maps onto LZMA2 settings; higher levels mean a larger dictionary, more memory, and meaningfully slower compression for modest additional savings. We go into what those levels actually buy you in the 7-Zip compression ratio guide — the same LZMA2 engine underlies Keka's 7z output.
Encryption. Keka does AES-256 for both 7z and ZIP, and for 7z it can encrypt the filename headers too — so the archive does not leak its own contents list to anyone who cannot open it. ZIP's format cannot hide the file list, which is a real reason to prefer 7z for anything sensitive.
Splitting. Set a volume size and Keka produces .7z.001, .7z.002, and so on. Still the most reliable way to move something enormous across a service with a hard per-file cap.
Exclusions. Keka can skip macOS's resource-fork files (.DS_Store, __MACOSX, ._ entries), which is what stops your archives from arriving on a colleague's Windows machine full of junk files.
Performance
You will find articles quoting precise speed and memory figures for these two apps. Treat them carefully — most are not reproducible, and both apps lean on the same well-known compression libraries underneath, so the encoder is rarely the variable.
What is reliably true:
- Extraction speed is dominated by the format, not the app. Unpacking a large LZMA2 archive is slow because LZMA2 decompression is slow. Unpacking a stored ZIP is fast in anything.
- Compression level dominates compression time. Moving from 7-Zip's normal level to its maximum can multiply encode time several times over for a single-digit percentage gain in size.
- Apple Silicon handles both fine. Multi-threaded LZMA2 scales well across performance cores; neither app is the bottleneck on a modern Mac.
If throughput on very large archives genuinely matters to you, the setting to change is the compression level, not the app.
Pricing, Licensing and Trust
Both are free, but the details differ in ways some people care about.
The Unarchiver is free on the Mac App Store. It was originally an independent project and is now maintained by MacPaw, the company behind CleanMyMac and Setapp. It is sandboxed as an App Store app must be.
Keka is free from keka.io and also listed on the Mac App Store for a small amount. The App Store listing is a donation mechanism — the developer says as much — and the builds are equivalent. Keka is open source under the GPL, notarized by Apple, and ships no telemetry. For anyone who wants to know exactly what an app that touches every file they compress is doing, source availability is a genuine advantage.
macOS Integration
Both integrate the way you would want:
- Set as the default handler for archive types, so double-clicking works.
- Drag-and-drop onto the Dock icon.
- Finder Services / right-click entries.
Keka adds a compression-specific touch: you can drop files onto a floating window or the Dock icon to compress them with the current settings, without opening the main interface. It is a small thing that becomes the main way you use the app.
Which Should You Install?
Install The Unarchiver if:
- You only ever open archives other people send you.
- You regularly deal with old formats or archives from non-English systems with garbled filenames.
- You want the smallest, most boring possible tool for one job.
Install Keka if:
- You create archives at all — even occasionally.
- You need password protection, encrypted filename headers, or split volumes.
- You want one tool instead of two.
Install both if: you compress regularly (Keka) but also hit a steady stream of awkward legacy archives (The Unarchiver as a fallback). They coexist without conflict; whichever you set as default handler wins, and you can force the other via right-click → Open With.
For a wider view of the category, including the paid options and how these two rank against them, see our best archive tools for Mac roundup. If you are choosing a compression format rather than an app, 7z vs ZIP is the more useful comparison.
What Neither of Them Can Do
Here is the limitation that trips people up, and it applies to Keka, The Unarchiver, 7-Zip, WinRAR and every other archiver equally.
Archiving already-compressed files saves almost nothing.
MP4 and MOV video, JPEG, PNG and HEIC images, PDFs, MP3 and AAC audio — all of these are already compressed, and usually with far more sophisticated algorithms than a general-purpose archiver applies. Running them through 7z at maximum settings typically recovers low single-digit percentages, sometimes literally nothing. You can spend twenty minutes compressing a folder of video and watch it shrink by 2%.
This surprises people because archiving does work spectacularly on other content. Source code, CSV exports, log files, uncompressed TIFF or BMP, database dumps — these compress by 80–95% because they are full of repetition an archiver can exploit. Media files have already had that repetition squeezed out. What lossless compression actually is covers why the ceiling exists.
So if your actual problem is "this 4 GB folder of video will not fit in an email / on this drive / through this upload limit," an archiver is the wrong tool. You need to re-encode the media — reduce the bitrate, change the codec, downscale the resolution — which is a different operation with a different trade-off, because it discards information rather than repacking it.
That is what Compresto is built for. It compresses video, images and PDFs directly on your Mac using hardware acceleration, so a 4 GB folder of video actually becomes 400 MB rather than 3.9 GB. Files never leave your machine, and batch processing means you point it at a folder rather than a file.
Use Keka for archiving. Use Compresto for making media smaller. They solve different problems, and most people who are frustrated with their archiver are actually facing the second one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Keka better than The Unarchiver?
For most people, yes — not because it extracts better, but because it also creates archives. If you never need to create one, The Unarchiver is perfectly adequate and slightly simpler.
Can Keka open password-protected archives?
Yes, for encrypted ZIP and 7z archives, provided you have the password. It also creates them, including 7z archives with encrypted filename headers.
Is The Unarchiver still maintained?
Yes. It is maintained by MacPaw and continues to receive updates on the Mac App Store.
Which is safer to use?
Both are reputable. Keka's advantage is that it is open source under the GPL and ships no telemetry, so its behaviour is independently verifiable. The Unarchiver is App Store sandboxed, which constrains what it can access. Different guarantees, both reasonable.
Do these tools work on Apple Silicon?
Yes, both run natively on Apple Silicon.