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 dd.
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.
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.
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.
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.
dd, that stands for ‘data duplicator’, is a command-line utility for Unix mainly used for copying and converting data.
A utility that can write a raw backup image of your hard drive to a removable device or vice versa.
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.
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.
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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.