IzPack Alternatives

Inno Setup

Inno Setup is a free installer for Windows programs. First introduced in 1997, Inno Setup today rivals and even surpasses many commercial installers in feature set and stability.

Features:

• Cross-platform
• Customizable
• Software installer

NSIS

NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a professional open source system to create Windows installers. It is designed to be as small and flexible as possible and is therefore very suitable for internet distribution. Being a users first experience with your product, a stable and reliable installer is an important component of successful software. With NSIS you can create such installers that are capable of doing everything that is needed to setup your software.

Features:

• Portable
• Scriptable
• Software installer

WiX

The Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset supports a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM setup packages.

Features:

• Command line
• Software installer
• WixEdit
• WixPie IDE

InstallForge

InstallForge is a very easy-to-use and flexible tool for creating fast installation packages for Windows.

Wix#

Wix# answers many MSI authoring challenges. It solves the common MSI/WiX authoring limitations in a very elegant and yet unorthodox way. Wix# follows the steps of other transcompilers like Script#, CoffeeScript or GWT by using source code of a more manageable syntax (C# in this case) to produce the desired source code of a less manageable syntax (WiX).

DCP Setup Maker

Powerful simple-to-use application to generate stable and multi-platform installers. Its intuitive user interface and exceptional ease of use makes it very easy to build complex desktop or web installers with large amounts of files.

Features:

• Java
• Cross-platform
• Nuget
• Portable
• Software installer

Makeself

makeself.sh is a small shell script that generates a self-extractable tar.gz archive from a directory. The resulting file appears as a shell script (many of those have a .run suffix), and can be launched as is. The archive will then uncompress itself to a temporary directory and an optional arbitrary command will be executed (for example an installation script). This is pretty similar to archives generated with WinZip Self-Extractor in the Windows world.