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.
United States



The best free alternative to InstallShield is Inno Setup. It's not free, so if you're looking for a free alternative, you could try Inno Setup or NSIS. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to InstallShield and many of them is free so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting free alternatives to InstallShield are DCP Setup Maker, Advanced Installer, IzPack and InstallForge.
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.



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.




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.

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.




Advanced Installer is a powerful and easy to use setup authoring tool which offers full Windows Installer support and more. You can configure every aspect of your installer through a simple graphical user interface or through its command line.



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




Professional installer software is an essential component for any software developer. The ideology behind the CreateInstall installer is based on two main principles. Complete control over the installation process and unlimited scalability.



CyberInstaller Suite is a packetization and installation software, oriented to every kind of developer. Thus, it can be applied to any language or development environment (.Net, C++, C#, Delphi, Java, PHP, Visual Basic, etc.




Spend your time developing your creations not building the installers. Download the fully functional freeware version of Install Creator and create your first installation in less than one minute!
The packaging formats used by different distributions of Linux can be a pain point for software developers wishing to release their projects in an easily consumable way. Debian and Ubuntu rely on .deb packages, while Fedora and RedHat both use .rpm style packaging systems.