When comparing The Unarchiver vs BBEdit, the Slant community recommends The Unarchiver for most people. In the question“What are the best Mac OSX apps for someone that's new to Apple?” The Unarchiver is ranked 1st while BBEdit is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose The Unarchiver is:
The app can be set up to work just as the built-in Archive Utility OSX comes with so that archives are extracted by a simple double-click.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Excellent Finder integration
The app can be set up to work just as the built-in Archive Utility OSX comes with so that archives are extracted by a simple double-click.
Pro Stable development, been around for decades
BBEdit is commercial software, the paid counterpart to their free application Textwrangler. Though BBEdit comes off as pricey, this allows for stable and consistent updates from the developers. BBEdit has been around since 1992.
Pro Can open very large files
Pro Just about every feature is already built in
No searching for plug-ins that may or may not work.
Pro Great customer support
The developer is very responsive to bug reports and feature suggestions.
Pro Native application
Follows platform standards.
Pro Built-in FTP/SFTP browser
BBEdit can open files directly from, and save them to, any available FTP server. It can also open and save files directly via SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol).
Pro Great JAMStack environment
You can build the static site of your dreams without needing any external assistants. Although it does not process LESS, SASS, or SCSS files, BBEdit's includes are very powerful.
Cons
Con Lacks RAR5 support
RAR 5.0 format introduced in 2013 uses a new compression algorithm that is not compatible with previous versions of the format. As such, all software needs to be updated to include support for RAR 5.0 and The Unarchiver has not yet added it.
Con Featureless
Con Expensive
It's US$49.99 a single user license.