ESPIRIDION  I purchased my last version of Stuffit Deluxe many years ago. The upgrade fees were not worth it to me, and I ended up using the Finder (or PathFinder) as well as RAR Expander, The Unarchiver, and more recently Springy which became my main application for expanding and compressing files.

Since I found a very attractive offer I decided to purchase Stuffit Deluxe 2009. Here are some observations:

1. At the regular price I would not have purchased the software. Even at $30 which is the upgrade fee it was not worth it to me.

2. For some purposes, the free alternatives are sufficient. For example, in terms of size and time I found no significant advantage using Stuffit when compressing or expanding ZIP files.

3. SITX files were smaller. That's a plus.

4. Browsing through archives and previewing files is a time saver. Springy has similar functionality, but I liked Stuffit better.

5. Expanding multiple archives at once is DANGEROUS. I expanded 4 archives, each one with 4 parts. Once the expansion was over, three of the archives were Zero K in size. Only the first one was expanded correctly. Expanded the archives individually worked fine.

6. The progress bar is deceiving. While expanding a multi-part archive the progress goes to full when the first part is expanded, even though expansion of the whole archive is not complete.

7. It did not work with some segmented files I received, with extensions .001, .002, etc., although these files are supported according to the manual.

Overall I'm pleased with Stuffit Deluxe. It supports multiple formats and has some useful features. It does have some shortcomings, including the price.

For an application that has been around for so many years, I was surprised by some of its behavior and errors. Hopefully these issues will be fixed and provided as a free update.  
(Version 13.0.3)

TRUSTME  Stuffit Deluxe 13.0.4 (& Stuffit Standard 13.0.4 & Stuffit Expander 13.0.4) already available:

http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/stuffit/index.html  
(Version 13.0.3)

MACMAN8  I share many of the same feelings stated before me. I have tried several times unsuccessfully to download this update. I switched browsers, using both Safari and Firefox, and none of these attempts worked. I also visited and tried to download from SmithMicro's own site. I'm doing this again as I type this comment. If I am again unable to get the SR4 download, I'll settle for the Expander update and leave it at that. I too am not thrilled about paying for a potential upgrade at Version 14, and may just stay with what I currently have on my Mac.  
(Version 13.0.3)

MIBRILANE  Once again, there is no such thing as StuffIt Deluxe 13.x. This is StuffIt Deluxe 2009 and this update is SR4.  
(Version 13.0.3)

MACINTOSH SAUCE  Watch it... They, like Roxio with Toast 10, have reached their update limit. Soon it will be bumped to StuffIt Deluxe 14.0 and you will have to pay an upgrade fee. :-/  
(Version 13.0.3)

ROB06AU  Be aware the current version downloadable is 13.0.2 still as at time of this post. This was release November last year.

It looks much like smith micro have dropped the ball on this one for now at least.  
(Version 13.0.3)

LIAM_IMAC  Forget stuffit deluxe.

You can only now download the trial if you provide them with a valid credit/debit card!! They then pre-authorize it and to be honest, they hope you will forget to tell them before the 30 day trial is up, that you don't want it, then.....kerrrr ching!

They must be desperate for sales to do this.  
(Version 13.0.2)

APPLECRYPT MODS  I have to be honest here, I use the Finder's ZIP function for just about everything these days. The only real use i have for Stuffit now would be the ability to split archives into smaller chunks. That's a fantastic feature when uploading to our server (esp with my ISP dropping connections!!).

However, I've found a freeware app called 'SimplyRAR' that does this (okay, for RAR format and not zip/sit - obviously). But this is cool. RAR is great and produces small archives too. And it's FREE.

I'm always on the lookout for new tools that can compress & split my archives! For now, it's the Finder and SimplyRAR :-)

Shame though, i used to like Stuffit back in the day...  
(Version 13.0.2)

MIBRILANE  StuffIt Deluxe is one of those "is it worth it" apps that many malign (see the other reviews here) as "obsolete" and unnecessary, as Mac OS X can now compress ZIP files directly without additional software.

Well, it does offer some features beyond that simple compression ability that I find useful. First, SITX files compress much smaller than ZIP does most of the time, and that's even without the extra file-type-specific compressors activated. I can also password protect archives, which the Mac OS X compression doesn't do.

Also, compressing and expanding with Magic Menu is easy and multi-threaded - up to four processes at a time - with queueing. I regularly compress twenty or thirty folders into archives at a time, and StuffIt Deluxe will compress them each into an individual archive, then delete the folder when it's done, and tell me it's done with each archive using Growl. Compressing via the Mac OS X compress function is a one-at-a-time affair and will compress everything selected into one archive.

Anyway, I find it useful and worth the upgrade price. I'm not sure I'd pay the retail price, though, but for those who have compression into archives as part of their backup workflow, it's worth having.

By the way, there is no StuffIt Deluxe 13.x version - it is now called StuffIt Deluxe 2009, and the current update is R3.  
(Version 13.0.2)

MACNERD1984  I have to agree with many reviews here - Stuffit has had it's chips. For a long time, years in fact, it was pretty much the first thing I installed on any clean/new OS set up. Everything I needed to compress was in .SIT or .SEA format. It was the de facto standard for Mac Newsgroup postings too. These days I don't have it on any of my machines - Zip has taken over and the need to pay out for something which is essentially obsolete (and in many cases can't even get file sizes as small as .ZIP does) is not there. Last time I tried it the decompression was so slow I thought there was a problem. An install on another Mac confirmed that actually it was just the way it was.

Aladdin, the original developers, probably saw this coming and offloaded Stuffit while they could. From what it seems, the new owners aren't exactly smart - Not only are they developing a product which is no longer strictly necessary for most users, but moreso they are also screwing people over on the upgrade. Unhappy users usually end up going elsewhere and there are plenty of open source and free compression/decompression apps out there today which negate the need for this relic.  
(Version 13.0.1)