RAR format in most cases provides significantly better compression than ZIP, especially in solid mode.

Another important feature of RAR is its support of multi-volume archives. They are more convenient and easier to use than so called ZIP "span disks" archives. WinRAR does not support ZIP disks spanning. If you need to create a multi-volume set, use RAR volumes instead.

RAR format also has a few important features absent in ZIP such as recovery record, which allows the restoration of physically damaged data, and locking of important archives to prevent their accidental modification.

RAR format is able to handle files of practically unlimited size (up to 8,589,934,591 GB), while the maximum size of a single file in a ZIP archive is 2 GB. Note that older file systems do not support files larger than 4 GB and you will need to use NTFS to work with such files.