Free InstallShield AlternativesSoftware Installers and other similar apps like InstallShield

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.

Velopack is an installation and auto-update framework for cross-platform desktop applications. It's opinionated, extremely easy to use with zero config needed. With just one command you can be up and running with an installable application, and it's lightning fast for...

WixSharp enables creating MSI files or WiX source code by using C# source code. Upon execution, the C# code is transformed into a MSI file or WiX source code. Thanks to C# features such as inheritance, it becomes easy to create installers.

Squirrel is both a set of tools and a library, to completely manage both installation and updating your Desktop Windows application, written in either C# or any other language (i.e., Squirrel can manage native C++ applications).

IzPack is a one-stop solution for packaging, distributing and deploying applications.

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.

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

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.