[olfactory]

Why does anyone use 7-Zip? Does it have any advantages over the more widely used alternatives (tarball and zip)?

[user5994461]

You need 7-zip to read tarball and zip on Windows.

[fake-name]

It has convenient windows packages.

[netheril96]

For me, it is support for unicode filenames.

There are extensions for tarball and zip file formats that handles the problem, but not many software supports these extensions, whereas every software supporting 7z handles unicode filenames correctly.

[Boulth]

Better compression I guess...