I get paid to review laptops here at Tom’s Guide, a fun gig that means I’m unboxing and setting up a new Mac every few months in our never-ending quest to suss out the best MacBook on the market.
Part of that work entails regularly loading up Macs with all the apps I need to get work done at home and on the go, then unloading them when we’re ready to send them back to Apple.
So not only have I gotten pretty adept at quickly setting up and making the most of a new MacBook, I’ve also developed strong feelings about which apps to get first. I even have a little system in my head of how to download them and in what order, starting with Google Chrome and Steam (got to get those benchmark game downloads started early) and ending somewhere after Slack.
Most of these are commonly used apps that everyone knows about, but there’s one I love that I think doesn’t get the attention it deserves. I’m talking about the most fun you can have unzipping things for free on the Mac App Store: The Unarchiver.
Unarchive everything for free
I really love Unarchiver because it’s like the built-in macOS file archiving utility, just better.
If you’re not familiar, a file archiver is just the tool you use to create file archives or unarchive them. The most common file archive most of us deal with is called a .zip file, and macOS Sequoia has no trouble working with those.
But if you like to get a little out there and move files around in formats like .7z or .rar, you’re going to need something a little more heavy-duty than plain ol’ macOS to open them. You could use a free open-source tool like 7-zip (and hey, I love it), but for my money nothing beats the Unarchiver for sheer versatility and ease of use.
I like a lot of things about the Unarchiver, starting with the price. I also appreciate that you can download it directly from the Unarchiver website or right from the Mac App Store, so it’s easy for me to find fast and I have no problem recommending it to people who balk at the thought of downloading a free app from a random website.
I also love the weird little tricks the Unarchiver can do to “unarchive” things you wouldn’t normally think to unpack, like Flash files. The Unarchiver can pull images and sounds out of .swf (Flash) files and pull images out of .pdf files, which is actually really useful in my day job as an editor.
Finally, I love that the Unarchiver has a dark mode because it’s 2025 and dang it, everything should have a dark mode.
For all these reasons and more I think the Unarchiver is one of the best Mac apps you’re (probably) not using, which hurts my heart. While it’s not an open-source unarchiver like 7-zip, over years of use I’ve just found Unarchiver to be the best unarchiving tool for my needs — and that’s why it’s now one of the first apps I install on every Mac I review.
