Winzip and Winrar are arguably the worlds most popular choices for compression softwares on Windows running machines (The Unix-es are a whole different story). But like me, you use only the general features your "zipping" software (I cant think of any special that winzip has, can you?), then you can get away from having to pay a license fee by switching to an open source alternative called 7-Zip.It can not only deal with typical format like Zip but also offers standard features like "Zip and Email", "Zip into multiple peices" and so on. But the biggest advantage I see is it's ability to compress better than Winzip (I havent compared it with Winrar - yet).
As a quick test, I spent an entire day using 7-zip alongside Winzip. That involved compressing my typical files with both Winzip (v11.2 [8094]) and 7-Zip (v4.57), the latest at the time of writing this article. The compression mode was set to use maximum compression. And without exception 7-zip came up on top with the smallest compressed file size.
Those of you not running Ubuntu Linux (thumbs up!) can check out this article for details on enabling support for your platform.
Website and image credits: 7-zip.org
See also: Moving to using Open source softwares and other articles on the Free and Open source (FOSS)