balenaEtcher is described as 'Ideal for creating bootable USBs and SD cards, ensuring safe, cross-platform use. Open-source, lightweight, and portable with a user-friendly interface' and is a leading bootable usb creator in the os & utilities category. There are more than 50 alternatives to balenaEtcher for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, Flathub and Flatpak apps. The best balenaEtcher alternative is Rufus, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like balenaEtcher are Ventoy, UNetbootin, YUMI exFAT and Win32 Disk Imager.
Formats USB drives to FAT, NTFS, exFAT, and more, while creating bootable USBs from diverse ISOs. Supports MS-DOS/FreeDOS with no external files and offers BIOS or UEFI mode, including bad block check. Ideal for systems lacking an OS or flashing BIOS and lightweight, ad-free.
It can host multiple OS', while balenaEtcher can't.
It works best and has features needed most.
Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO files. With ventoy, you don't need to format the disk again and again, you just need to copy the iso file to the USB drive and boot it.
balenaEtcher had some privacy issue in the past. Ventoy doesn't "phone home". Why an USB image creator needs to send some data out anyway?
When a new OS image is available, I can just copy it to my Ventoy USB, and test it out really easily.
Ventoy only needs a one time setup and all bootable ISOs are just placed in your USB drive. Also your USB drive keeps being a storage device when you're in your OS
Cross-platform tool for making bootable USB and Live USB drives, featuring a built-in downloader for Linux ISO images and rescue disks, supporting BSD and various utilities. No installation required, it runs directly and offers compatibility and community support for many distributions.
I cannot choose Winshit 10
It doesn't appear to just write images to disk
The YUMI exFAT (Your Universal Multiboot Installer) media creation tool can be used to automatically create an exFAT bootable USB flash drive containing multiple operating systems, antivirus utilities, disc cloning, diagnostic tools, and more.
A utility that can write a raw backup image of your hard drive to a removable device or vice versa.
A lot smaller and more native to the Windows platform than Etcher
Win32 Disk Imager, despite its name, does not "create" disk images: it only writes/mounts pre-existing .img files to flash storage.
dd, that stands for ‘data duplicator’, is a command-line utility for Unix mainly used for copying and converting data.
A good command-line alternative that comes with Unix-based operating systems. It's what I use on my MacBook to burn Linux ISO images on my USB drive.
It's application free, and already, always installed in system !
It's command line. That means it does not have garbage inside the program. But it might freak some people out. But Literally, you have Git Bash so you can use DD on Windows.
The usage:
$ lsblk /dev/sdb 28G /dev/sda 931G $ dd if=popos.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M status=progress
It's really nice.
Universal USB Installer is a Live Linux USB Creator that allows you to choose from a selection of Linux Distributions to put on your USB Flash Drive. The Universal USB Installer is easy to use. Simply choose a Live Linux Distribution, the ISO file, your Flash Drive and, Click...
LiLi USB Creator is a free software for Windows that allows you to create a bootable Live USB key with a Linux on it.
MultiBootUSB is a software to create multi boot live Linux on a removable media i.e USB disk. It is similar to UNetbootin but many distros can be installed, provided you have enough space on the disk.
USBImager is a really really simple GUI application that writes compressed disk images to USB drives and creates backups.
USBImager is a 300 kilobyte download compared to balenaEtcher's 80+ megabyte. They're both cross-platform (Windows/macOS/Linux). The reason is USBImager is a native app while balenaEtcher is an Electron app.
balenaEtcher is still a bit more user-friendly, but USBImager is by far the best cross-platform alternative right now.
Is like etcher but installed occupies 508,43 KiB in disk, instead 500MB of spyware and electron crap.
Small, simple and does everything it needs to without any unnecessary bells and whistles.
The easiest way to create legacy macOS bootable drives on modern Macs. Revive old Intel Macs using your Apple Silicon machine — no terminal knowledge required.
Flexible and configurable USB drive multiboot solution which also supports UEFI booting.
Ireland
EU
China
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United States
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Poland
I am convinced BalenaEtcher is recommended by people who have never used it. I have never even witnessed it successfully complete a write. Rufus has always worked.