Introduction
7Z is a compressed archive file format used primarily by 7-Zip, a free archiver program for Windows. While 7Z is a relatively well-known format, it is nowhere near as popular as ZIP. Pretty much every program that works with archives can work with ZIP; on the other hand, support for 7Z is spotty at best. As such, you may want to convert your existing 7Z archives into ZIP file format; this will help you avoid compatibility issues. Also, working with 7Z archives on Mac is not exactly convenient; though extracting them is an easy process, it’s fairly difficult to create 7Z archives on Mac. So, when creating archives on Mac, you will likely use ZIP. So you may want to convert all other archives to ZIP to make sure all of your archives have the same format. There are several ways to convert 7Z to ZIP on Mac, but the easiest one is to use a converter program. We took it upon ourselves to determine the best 7Z to ZIP converter for Mac; read the article below for a list of programs fit for this purpose.
What is the best 7Z to ZIP converter for Mac?
WinZip Mac
The best 7Z to ZIP converter on Mac is undoubtedly WinZip. It is a powerful archive manager program that is available on both Mac and Windows. It supports many archive file formats, including 7Z, and has many powerful features. It allows you to view files inside archives without extracting them, protect your archives with a password, and upload them into cloud. The Pro version also includes support for making file backups and automatically adding watermarks. But even if you aren’t interested in these features, you should know that WinZip Mac can be used to extract 7Z files and convert 7Z to ZIP. The process is both simple and fast, which is why WinZip is the best 7Z to ZIP converter for Mac.
Various online converters
There are several websites online that can convert 7Z to ZIP, and vice versa. We do not truly recommend any of them, as they have many issues. The most obvious one is privacy; any site that offers to convert your files may be secretly storing or analyzing them. Thus, you should not use these sites to convert archives containing sensitive data. The conversion will also take longer, especially if you have a slow internet connection.
Nonetheless, such converters still have their place; for example, if you just need to convert one file and don’t want to install any programs. Not all of them are trustworthy, but here’s a few that are more trustworthy than most.
Convertio
Convertio is a versatile converter website that can convert many files, 7Z and ZIP included. It can convert files located on your computer, as well as in your Dropbox and Google Drive accounts. It can also reverse the procedure by converting ZIP to 7Z. Despite all of this, Convertio is not very useful; free users are limited to converting files up to 100 MB in size, which is nothing when it comes to archives.
CloudConvert
CloudConvert is an alternative to Convertio that has several advantages. For one, it provides you with an option to specify the archive’s password, thus allowing you to convert encrypted archives. Additionally, it can be used to convert archives up to 1 GB in size, which is far better than Convertio’s restrictive limtation. It can convert ZIP to 7Z as well.
Converting the archive manually
One simple way to convert 7Z to ZIP on Mac, as well as on Windows, is to do it manually. That is to say, unpack your 7Z archive into a folder, then compress the resulting folder as a ZIP archive. Any specialized program will essentially perform the same steps, so it is not necessary to use a dedicated converter app.
Also, consider this: if you are trying to convert 7Z to ZIP so that you could extract it afterwards, creating a ZIP archive is not necessary at all. You can simply extract the 7Z file itself and be done with it.
Conclusion
The best 7Z to ZIP converter for Mac is a program called WinZip Mac. It works with other formats as well; for example, it can convert RAR to ZIP.
If you don’t want to install a program, you may use a website to convert 7Z to ZIP instead. However, these websites have limited functionality, and have obvious privacy issues.
Meanwhile, here’s something for you to consider. Creating 7Z archives on Windows is easy; one simply needs to install 7-Zip. But on macOS, this process is less straightforward. Life would be a lot easier if you could just run Windows apps on Mac, don’t you think? Turns out, you can do that. A special program called Parallels Desktop can be used to install Windows 10 on Mac and run Windows apps and games.