Turn a RAR into a ZIP
RAR needs software most people do not have. ZIP opens on every computer with nothing installed. This reads the one and writes the other, with nothing stored.
- Never stored
- No queue, no waiting
- No signup, no watermark
How it works
Add your RAR
RAR4 and RAR5 are both read, with their folders kept.
Check what is inside
Everything is listed before it is rebuilt, so you can see what you are getting.
Download the ZIP
The same files, in a format anything can open.
Unpack, then repack — and what that costs
There is no direct path between the two formats. The RAR is read out completely and a fresh ZIP is built from the files inside it, which has two consequences worth knowing in advance. The first is memory: both archives exist at once while the conversion runs, so this is the heaviest operation among the archive tools and the one most likely to defeat a phone. The second is size — the ZIP is usually bigger than the RAR was, often noticeably, because RAR compresses harder than deflate does. You are trading size for the ability to open the file anywhere, which is normally the trade you want.
Files that were already compressed inside the RAR — JPEGs, MP4s, PDFs — are stored rather than pointlessly deflated again, and names are written flagged as UTF-8 so that accented and non-Latin filenames survive being unzipped on macOS and Linux. Timestamps are carried across and clamped into the range a ZIP can represent, which runs from 1980 to 2099.
Three kinds of RAR cannot be read at all, and none of them is a gap that can be closed. An encrypted archive needs a password this page never asks for. A solid archive compresses its files as one continuous stream, so reaching any file means decompressing everything before it — which is handled for reading but combines badly with building a second archive at the same time. And a multi-part set — .part1.rar and its siblings — is opened as the single file you dropped in, because the rest of the data is in the parts you did not.
Permissions and symbolic links recorded in the RAR do not reach the ZIP: nothing here reads an entry's Unix mode, so what comes out is plain files with default permissions. For documents and pictures that does not matter. For an archive of a source tree it does.
When you want something else
The direct route is one command with 7-Zip, which reads RAR and writes ZIP without either archive passing through a browser: extract with 7z x file.rar and repack with 7z a -tzip file.zip folder/. It handles encrypted, solid and multi-part archives, streams to disk so size is irrelevant, and preserves the permissions this cannot.
Before converting, consider not converting. 7-Zip, The Unarchiver and VLC all open RAR files directly and are free — if the goal is to read what is inside, opening it is simpler and loses nothing. Repacking is worth it specifically when you need to pass the archive on to someone who cannot open a RAR, and it will cost you some size to do it.
Frequently asked questions
Does converting lose anything?
The files themselves come through exactly — they are unpacked and repacked, not re-encoded, so every byte is identical. What does not survive is RAR-specific housekeeping: recovery records, archive comments and RAR's own solid-block arrangement have no equivalent in a ZIP.
Will the ZIP be bigger?
Sometimes slightly, because RAR generally compresses a little harder than ZIP does. What you gain is a file anyone can open without installing anything.
Are my files stored anywhere?
No. The archive is built and saved straight to your downloads, and nothing is kept afterwards. That matters here: the things people most often need to zip — documents, photographs, a folder of work — are exactly the things that should not be handed to a stranger's server first.
Can it convert a password-protected RAR?
No. The contents cannot be read without the password, so there is nothing to rebuild. The page lists what is inside and says which files are locked.
Can you go the other way, ZIP to RAR?
No, and no browser tool honestly can. RAR compression is proprietary and the only code that creates it is licensed on terms forbidding its use in another archiver, so no permissively-licensed RAR writer exists anywhere.
Good to know: This reads a RAR and writes a ZIP, which means it can only handle RARs this browser can open: not encrypted, not solid, not split across volumes. Recompressing to ZIP usually makes the file larger, because RAR compresses harder than ZIP does.
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