A great compression utility that is small and simple.

7-Zip in my opinion is one of the best compression utilities on the internet today. For general use it is fast and easy to use/learn.

It is free and open source software and has been around for many years. It is small in size and doesn't take a lot of room for installation. It can be added to the context menu in windows which makes it very easy to compress files or folders in Windows File Explorer.

I have not had any issues using any compressed files that I have made in 7-zip using the zip format with any other compression utilities or the built in compression utility included in most newer versions of Windows. It will also decompress many other file formats that are listed in the exert of their website below.

It does include a very minimalistic file manager that really gets the job done and done quickly.

This is the exert from 7-zip's website.

License
7-Zip is free software with open source. The most of the code is under the GNU LGPL license. Some parts of the code are under the BSD 3-clause License. Also there is unRAR license restriction for some parts of the code. Read 7-Zip License information.

You can use 7-Zip on any computer, including a computer in a commercial organization. You don't need to register or pay for 7-Zip.

The main features of 7-Zip
High compression ratio in 7z format with LZMA and LZMA2 compression
Supported formats:
Packing / unpacking: 7z, XZ, BZIP2, GZIP, TAR, ZIP and WIM
Unpacking only: APFS, AR, ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DMG, EXT, FAT, GPT, HFS, IHEX, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MBR, MSI, NSIS, NTFS, QCOW2, RAR, RPM, SquashFS, UDF, UEFI, VDI, VHD, VHDX, VMDK, XAR and Z.
For ZIP and GZIP formats, 7-Zip provides a compression ratio that is 2-10 % better than the ratio provided by PKZip and WinZip
Strong AES-256 encryption in 7z and ZIP formats
Self-extracting capability for 7z format
Integration with Windows Shell
Powerful File Manager
Powerful command line version
Plugin for FAR Manager
Localizations for 87 languages
7-Zip works in Windows 11 / 10 / 8 / 7 / Vista / XP / 2022 / 2019 / 2016 / 2012 / 2008 / 2003 / 2000.