Installers: WIX or Inno Setup?

windows installation wix inno-setup
Brent Arias picture Brent Arias · Jun 5, 2011 · Viewed 19.8k times · Source

I'm comparing these two tools. The impression I have is:

  • Inno Setup does not produce an MSI, but can do everything WIX can do
  • WIX does produce an MSI, but has a steep learning curve

Do you agree with this characterization? What other differences are there? How does WIX# shake-up this story? Since Inno Setup does not use the windows installer, does it have difficulty with uninstalls? Can Inno Setup, upon command, downgrade an installation to an earlier version - or can it only install / upgrade applications?

Answer

Robert Love picture Robert Love · Jun 6, 2011

It's been a long time since I worked with MSI, when I switched to InnoSetup I never looked back.

I did not want my installation to be a headache. I needed something where I could "Set it and forget it"

By default InnoSetup produces an uninstall. It can handle simple or complex install and uninstall needs.

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.

Related questions

Creating a MSI patch (.msp) by hand?

Our team has recently been considering pushing out a minor registry fix to users to modify one particular problematic key. Pretty straightforward stuff, just needed to update 1 key/value inside the registry. So at the moment, we are using Wix …

Read More
How to change the Windows service startup type in a WiX installer

We need to modify the Startup type of our Windows service from "Automatic" to "Automatic Delayed Start". How do I do this? My code is like this: <ServiceInstall Id="WinServiceInstall" Name="ServiceManager" DisplayName="ServiceManager" Type="ownProcess" Start="auto" ErrorControl="…

Read More
Use Wix installer to add shortcut to subfolder in startmenu programs

I am trying to add my program shortcut to an existing folder in the start menu shortcuts. For example All Programs -> AppNameFolder -> AppNameVersionFolder -> AppShortcut In order to achieve this I added the extra lines: &…

Read More