SETUP.EXE or SETUP.MSI ???? What is best to distribute exe file.

[dilettante]

The advantages of an EXE setup are that there are many tools available for creating them, and some tools make both very simple and very complex installs easy to create.

The advantages of an MSI setup are that they can be deployed in many ways (either manually, through administrative distribution, or through a Windows feature called "advertisement") and natively support rollback for clean uninstalls as well as patching and versioning, and have logging support for resolving installation troubles. It is also possible to create an MSI package that can install without administrator credentials.

The main disadvantage of EXE setups is that they are being discouraged in newer Windows versions. Windows Vista only supports them through "legacy installer heuristics" which is an algorithm that looks at various factors (including the name of the setup package) to try to determine that the EXE is an installer package, and if it judges the program to be an installer will run it elevated upon user approval (which may require entering an admin user/pw). This is a "legacy application compatability" feature in Vista that may not be present in future versions of Windows. What this means is that an EXE setup cannot be run without administrator credentials unless it works hard to hide the fact that it is an installer.