Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Application type
Alerts
- Discontinued
Platforms
- Windows
- Linux


The last update is from Sept 2020.
SUSE Studio ImageWriter vs balenaEtcher Comments


- SUSE Studio ImageWriter is Free and Open Source
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 Python 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.


The last update is from Sept 2020.



Flash disk images onto your drives with ease. Select an image, insert your drive, and you're good to go!




UUByte ISO Editor is a full ISO toolkit for burning, creation, extracting and editing. Powered by a simple user interface, it is quite easy to make a bootable USB or DVD in a few clicks.



Automatically make a live bootable usb with ease with AutoBootDisk, a open-source program

SharpBoot is a small utility for creating multiboot ISO or USB. You just need to drag-n-drop some iso files inside, and it automatically adds description and category (for supported ISO files, not shown in the screenshot). It uses Syslinux for the menu and bootloader.


Mac Linux USB Loader is an application that allows you to create bootable USB drives containing a Linux distribution that can boot natively on Apple's Macintosh computers using their EFI system, regardless of whether or not the selected distribution has UEFI support.




Bootqt is a simple app for making a bootable USB drive from an ISO or IMG file. It is written in Python and uses Qt technologies to provide an easy to use graphical user interface.



USBWriter is tiny Windows tool that lets you write an image file directly to an USB drive. It requires no installation and depends on no bloated framework, it's just a little program that you may put on your desktop.

A user-friendly, lightweight TUI wrapper for the dd command written in Rust that performs easy disk imaging and ISO burning with only a single command with graphs and rich confirmation dialogs.

Create Windows USB on a Mac MeowUSB simplifies the process of creating a bootable Windows USB on your Mac.
Etcher requires me to download 57.42 MiB from the Arch repos. Whereas the SUSE ImageWriter only needs 0.11 MiB. This is a factor of 522x!
This is because Etcher is incredibly bloated by electron and their ads. Yet, the SUSE ImageWriter does the same thing and managed to create a bootable Manjaro live USB for me.
I think Etcher is nothing but ridiculous compared to this.