Innosetup vs

Extensive support for both administrative and non administrative installations. Supports creation of a single EXE to install your program for easy online distribution. Disk spanning is also supported. Standard Windows wizard interface.

Customizable setup types , e. Full, Minimal, Custom. Complete uninstall capabilities. Creation of shortcuts anywhere, including in the Start Menu and on the desktop. Creation of registry and. INI entries. Running other programs before, during or after install. Support for multilingual installs, including right-to-left language support.

Support for passworded and encrypted installs. Silent install and uninstall. Unicode installs. Integrated preprocessor option for advanced compile-time customization. Integrated Pascal scripting engine option for advanced run-time install and uninstall customization. Full source code is available from GitHub.

Tiny footprint: only about 1. All features are fully documented. It isn't perfect, but it saves a ton of time by letting you do things the Inno Setup way and then get most of the benefits of MSI e. This works best if mostly just deploying files to the system and a handful of registry entries i. I wouldn't recommend this approach for a larger application where there are lots and lots of components, but if you try it and it works, let me know!

You can't just take any ol' Inno Setup installer and wrap it with the WiX script and expect it to work it probably won't. But maybe a future version of Inno Setup will natively support something similar. But we decided to promote innosetup exe files for non business customers and msi only on demand for one simple reason. You can't ship a multi-localized version of setup program with MSI.

You would need one installer for every language and this sucks huge. There might be some heavy hacking allowing you to rewrite the whole GUI but this is not well documented and no open source to steal and a lot of work.

With Innosetup it's easy to ship one exe in 5 languages. The MSI for business users who need group policies etc. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow.

Learn more. Asked 10 years, 7 months ago. Active 3 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 22k times. Brent Arias. Brent Arias Brent Arias For anyone who chooses Wix in the end, please use WixSharp togother, it will save you days. I prefer GetWebInstaller.

In any case you can use standard installer from Visual Studio. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. With InnoSetup You have a few different ways you can upgrade applications. Initially we did use the overwrite method which just overwrote the existing installation. Recently we switched an automatic uninstall of the previous version when new version was installed. With InnoSetup downgrades are typically uninstall and reinstall the older version. Tim Cooper k 36 36 gold badges silver badges bronze badges.

Robert Love Robert Love 12k 2 2 gold badges 48 48 silver badges 77 77 bronze badges. If you software is delivered to consumers, InnoSetup is an option.

If your software is delivered to enterprises, I would only use MSI. I paid the learning curve for MSI a long time ago. Our software is internal and for an enterprise. Show 6 more comments. This is a huge issue for large corporations. With the exception of compiled custom actions an MSI file is a "white box". If the setup changes something crazy such as the system-wide network settings, you can actually see it. Customizability - An MSI can be customized via transforms to fit an organization's needs and standards whilst still allowing interoperability with the vendor's installer updates.

You don't change the installer itself, you create your customization in a separate, organization-specific file called the transform. You are free to disable custom actions and in general anything in the installer, and "black box" custom actions can be approved by contacting the vendor for explanation. These transform files are also sometimes used to localize an MSI file to different languages. Several transforms can be applied to a single MSI. Standardization - MSI does not lend itself to "allowing anything".

It provides a comprehensive framework for the installer, which crucially also includes the uninstall - all in standard format. The installer GUI is also standardized with built-in features to support silent installation and uninstallation which can be triggered remotely. Management and reporting - Windows Installer maintains a comprehensive database of all items a product has installed.

You can reliably determine if a product is installed, what features were installed, and what file versions were installed. In addition you can get a list of any patches that have been applied to the base product, if any.

Security - following from the comprehensive installation database it is possible to detect security vulnerabilities in the installed products. MSI also encompasses "elevated rights" principles which allows a restricted user to trigger the install of a product that requires admin privileges to install. This is part of the "advertisement feature" which allows an administrator to make installers available to users without actually installing them on all workstations.

There is no need to mess with temporary rights to get things working. Validation - MSI files can be checked with validation rules to ensure it is in compliance with a number of internal consistency rules referred to as ICE. Corporations can create their own ICE checks to enforce special corporate rules and requirements.

This helps greatly with QA. Resiliency - The Admin install feature of Windows installer provides a standard way to extract the source files from an MSI. These source files can then be put on a share and be available to all workstations for installation.

This ensures repair, uninstall and modify operations complete without requesting the installation media on CD or similar. This is particularly important for patching and update operations which may require access to the old versions source files in special circumstances.

Rollback - The installation of an MSI file will normally trigger the creation of a restore point. Furthermore all files and registry items replaced or overwritten during the installation will be saved and restored if the install fails to complete.

This ensure that the workstation is left in a stable state even if the install should fail. As you might expect poorly designed MSI files can violate the built-in features of Windows here, see my other post in this thread for more details. Updates are standardized to a few basic variants, and this allows updates to be performed with a higher degree of certainty.