In 2010 Tom's Hardware benchmarks comparing it to the other popular archivers WinZip, 7-Zip, and WinRAR, FreeArc narrowly outperformed them in its "best compression" mode, but lost to 7-Zip's LZMA2 in the "default compression" tests, still compressing better than WinRAR and WinZip at this setting [REF].
In a metric devised by Werner Bergmans of Maximum Compression Benchmark, FreeArc compression is more efficient than programs for classic formats like .Z (LZW), .zip