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.
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.
Last commit to the repository was on Jun 28, 2023, and latest version is from Feb 4, 2021.
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.
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.
A utility that can write a raw backup image of your hard drive to a removable device or vice versa.
The latest version is from 2017.
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.
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...
Utility for step-by-step creation of bootable macOS USB installers using official sources. Features compatibility checks, support for multiple Mac types, download resume, installer cache, signature verification, history, logs, and multilingual interface.
macUSB is a free and open-source macOS app for creating bootable USB media for macOS, Linux, and Windows. It is designed as an all-in-one tool that guides the user through the entire process step by step, while supporting both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.
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 latest version (1.0.10) was released in October 2023.
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.
Ireland
EU
China
Canada
United States
Italy
Poland
Germany
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.