Inno Setup
by Inno Setup · Open-source installer builder for Windows applications
26.2 — BenchRank score out of 100
Screenshots of Inno Setup
Homepage
Overview
Inno Setup is an open-source installation builder for Windows applications, in use since 1997. It produces a standard Windows setup wizard that installs files, creates shortcuts and registry entries, registers DLLs, installs fonts and runs other programs, with deflate, bzip2 and 7-Zip LZMA compression. Installs can be silent, multilingual, passworded, encrypted or digitally signed.
- Best for
- Windows developers who need to package a desktop application as a single installer EXE.
- Pricing
- No prices are shown; the software is open source with source on GitHub, and commercial users are asked to purchase a commercial licence.
Strengths and trade-offs
Strengths
- Single EXE installers, silent install and full uninstall
- Covers Windows releases since 2006, including x64 and Arm64
- Preprocessor and Pascal scripting for custom install logic
- Full source on GitHub; 1.78 MB overhead with all features
Trade-offs
- Windows only; no macOS or Linux installer targets are mentioned
- Commercial users are asked to buy a licence, but no price is published
- Copyrighted with restrictions on distribution and use, per LICENSE.TXT
How this score is made up
Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.
- MCP support
- 0 out of 100
- Documentation
- 0 out of 100
- Agent friendliness
- 38 out of 100
- Changelog
- 100 out of 100
- Marketing site structure
- 50 out of 100
- Operational trust
- 0 out of 100
Measured, but not part of the score
Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.
- Openness
- 30 out of 100
- Maintenance
- 100 out of 100
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