What is balenaEtcher used for?

balenaEtcher is a cross-platform desktop app for writing OS images to SD cards and USB drives with built-in safety checks and verification. It is a good fit for preparing Raspberry Pi SD cards and creating bootable USB installers for Linux.

Is balenaEtcher open source?

Yes. balenaEtcher is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at balena-io/etcher and is written mainly in TypeScript.

Is balenaEtcher free?

Yes. balenaEtcher is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

What are some alternatives to balenaEtcher?

Similar open-source tools in the Developer Tools category include Ventoy, Rufus and Godot. SaaS products in the same category include GitKraken, 1DevTool and Beyond Compare.

Is balenaEtcher actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to balenaEtcher was on 18 September 2026, and the latest release is v2.1.7, published on 18 September 2026. The project has 34k stars on GitHub.

balenaEtcher: open-source developer tools

About balenaEtcher

Etcher, from balena, is a desktop application for flashing operating system images to SD cards and USB drives. It is built with web technologies and aims to make the process safe: it helps prevent accidental writes to your own hard drives and verifies that every byte was written correctly. It can also write directly to Raspberry Pi hardware that offers USB device boot mode, and it is released under the Apache-2.0 license.

Etcher runs on most 64-bit Linux distributions, Windows 10 and later, and macOS 10.13 and later on both Intel and Apple Silicon. Installers are available from the downloads page, and packages exist for Debian and Ubuntu, Red Hat and Fedora, the Arch User Repository, WinGet and Chocolatey. The project provides documentation, a support channel, a contributing guide and a milestones roadmap on GitHub.

Key features

Flash OS images to SD cards and USB drives
Guards against writing to system drives
Verifies written data after flashing
Flashes Raspberry Pi devices in USB boot mode
Installers for Linux, Windows and macOS
Packages for apt, yum, AUR, WinGet and Chocolatey

Good fit for

→Preparing Raspberry Pi SD cards
→Creating bootable USB installers for Linux

Built with: TypeScript
Tags: disk-imaging; usb; sd-card; raspberry-pi; bootable-usb; desktop-app; cross-platform; balena

balenaEtcher: questions and answers

What is balenaEtcher used for?: balenaEtcher is a cross-platform desktop app for writing OS images to SD cards and USB drives with built-in safety checks and verification. It is a good fit for preparing Raspberry Pi SD cards and creating bootable USB installers for Linux.
Is balenaEtcher open source?: Yes. balenaEtcher is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at balena-io/etcher and is written mainly in TypeScript.
Is balenaEtcher free?: Yes. balenaEtcher is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
What are some alternatives to balenaEtcher?: Similar open-source tools in the Developer Tools category include Ventoy, Rufus and Godot. SaaS products in the same category include GitKraken, 1DevTool and Beyond Compare.
Is balenaEtcher actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to balenaEtcher was on 18 September 2026, and the latest release is v2.1.7, published on 18 September 2026. The project has 34k stars on GitHub.