Rufus is the usual name that comes up when someone needs a bootable USB stick on Windows, and balenaEtcher covers similar ground with a narrower focus. It writes OS images to SD cards and USB drives and checks the result. Version 2.1.9 from Balena Ltd. is free and weighs 261.5 MB.
Who a single-purpose flasher suits
Etcher fits people who want to put an ISO or IMG file on removable media without tuning partition schemes or file systems. Typical jobs are preparing an installer for an operating system or writing an image for a single-board computer. The category is operating systems, with utilities as a second label, and tags such as boot, iso, img and usb describe the work well.
If you want to keep several images on one stick, Ventoy is listed among the alternatives and takes a different approach.
Drive protection and byte verification
The program is built with web technologies, and its main selling point is safety during the write. It guards against accidentally writing to your hard drives, which is the classic risk with low-level tools such as dd. After flashing, it confirms that every byte was written correctly.
It can also flash Raspberry Pi devices directly, provided they support USB device boot mode.
Size, license and what it does not do
The installer is 261.5 MB, large for a tool that does one thing, which follows from its web-based build. The license is Apache-2.0 and there is no charge. Flashing is its whole job, so there are no options for building custom installers or adjusting boot settings. Windows users who want those controls would look at other tools from the alternatives list.
What's new in 2.1.9
Version 2.1.9 updates Electron to 44.9.1 and moves etcher-util to Node.js 24. It also builds native addons with upstream node-gyp on Windows, and the etcher-util build includes the eMudhra CA fix.
balenaEtcher pros and cons
Pros
- Free under the Apache-2.0 license
- Protects against accidental writes to internal hard drives
- Verifies that every byte was written correctly
- Can flash Raspberry Pi devices that support USB device boot mode
- Downloaded from github.com, the official host
Cons
- 261.5 MB is a large download for a single-purpose tool
- Only flashes images, with no extra boot or partition options
- Holds one image per drive, unlike multi-image tools such as Ventoy
Is balenaEtcher safe?
The download is served from github.com, the official host, and we do not host the file. The publisher is Balena Ltd., and the code is released under Apache-2.0. The app is designed to avoid writing to your hard drives by mistake, but you should still check the target drive before flashing, since the write replaces what is on it.
How to install balenaEtcher
- Press the download button to get the official file.
- Run the installer you saved and confirm the Windows security prompt if the publisher matches.
- Follow the setup steps, then start balenaEtcher from the Start menu.
