It turns out that WinRAR and 7-Zip are among the best packing programs at the moment and are quite similar.
Nevertheless, 7-Zip is slightly faster, more efficient, more secure and thus a nose ahead of WinRAR. So if you spend some time to get familiar with 7-Zip, 7-Zip is a good choice. However, the differences between the two packing programs are very small.
on the other hand:
WinRAR is the best trade-off between fast enough, compressed enough.
7zip, after more than 20 years, does not even know how to create a recovery record that can repair damaged archives via redundant data and parity.
Winrar can read many formats, but officially only .rar and .zip.
But what do you do if you need a .cab for example?
Quite simple.
Select rar or zip as usual, set the desired compression etc.. But now rename the file extension .zip or .rar to .cab and then pack the desired files. or use the new functionality
i personally use win rar for longer than 20 years, i paid once 10 deutsche mark (4$ today). why change?