Advanced Installer vs makeself

Advanced Installer is a Windows authoring tool for building packages that install, update, and configure software products. It creates MSI, EXE, and MSIX packages; listed output formats also include APPX, App-V, MST, and ThinApp. Command-line packaging, silent installation, auto-updates, and delta updates are supported. Continuous integration support includes Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, TeamCity, and Bamboo. The Architect edition can repackage legacy installations and provides MECM and Intune integration for packaging and deployment workflows. Freeware features are available without a license for Simple projects; licensed features require a valid license. Professional costs $399 a year, Enterprise costs $1,399 a year, and Enterprise Team costs $3,599 a year for five users. One-time purchase options are listed at $599 per user for Professional and $2,399 per user for Enterprise. Non-freeware features have a 30-day trial, but trial-built packages are for testing only. The current application requires Windows 10 or 11; produced MSI or EXE installers are listed for Windows 7 or newer and Windows Server 2008 R2 or newer.

makeself is a shell script for packaging directories as self-extracting compressed TAR archives. Each archive includes a shell stub that extracts its contents to a temporary directory and can run an optional command, such as an installation script, before removing temporary files. Archive options let users list files, check integrity, select an extraction target, request confirmation or skip the embedded command. Compression choices include gzip, bzip2, bzip3, xz, lz4 and zstd, among other compressors; using a non-default method requires the corresponding compressor to be installed for extraction. Archives can include CRC or MD5 checksums, with optional SHA256 support. Creation also offers GPG and OpenSSL encryption, which requires those tools on the archive user's system. The project aims to avoid Bash-specific features and run on Unix-compatible systems with a compatible Bourne shell and the required compression programs. It lists Linux, macOS, several Unix and BSD systems, and Windows through Cygwin or WSL among tested platforms. makeself is free and covered by GNU General Public License version 2 and above; generated archives do not have to use that license. The project notes that archives made before version 2.1.2 may have extraction problems on some GNU/Linux distributions because of obsolete head and tail syntax.