What Is The Difference Between MSI And EXE Installations?

MSI packaging is considered to be the future of application packaging and Microsoft encourages software developers and administrators to reformat the EXE packages to MSI packages. MSI packages are created according to the standard definition created by the Windows Installer Technology from Microsoft. This means that all the MSI packages which are created using different packaging tools have similar deployment and management system. EXE files, on the other hand, are just executable files which don't adhere to any defined standard. Depending on the creation tool used, an EXE installation might have different customised options for installation and uninstallation, error handling process and deployment method.

As there are no single standard for EXE installation, different vendors use different set of standards to create their own executables. Thus, two installers, created by two different creation tools, namely Wise Studio and InstallSheild will have everything different. This is a major headache for every network administrators who are often required to push unattended remote software installation and uninstallation and are responsible for software infrastructure of an organisation. Moreover, most of the EXE installers don't support silent mode of installation.

A typical EXE set up has different interactive options during the installation and the user needs to click on different options during different steps of the installation. Thus, the IT guy needs to click on those options on every computer they want to install the software on, one by one. This can be very time-consuming and almost impossible if the plan is to install it remotely.