Ventoyvs
Rufus
Rufus: Pick Rufus when you need one carefully prepared installer, full control over partition scheme and Secure Boot behaviour, and a codebase distributions actually package.
Ventoy
Multiboot USB creator that boots ISO files copied onto an ordinary partition
As of 30 August 2026, Ventoy is free to use. A bootloader you install once to a USB stick, after which you add or remove operating system images by dragging files onto it. Softwr lists it under Utilities. Ventoy is made by Ventoy project, available on Windows, Linux.
Overview
What Ventoy does
Ventoy installs a bootloader to a USB drive and creates a large data partition. Any ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD or EFI file copied to that partition appears in a boot menu at power-on, and the file is booted in place rather than extracted. It supports both BIOS and UEFI, over 1,100 tested images, persistence overlays for live Linux sessions, and a JSON plugin file for menu layout, automatic installation answer files and theming. The difference that matters operationally is that the drive stays a normal storage volume. A technician can carry one 256 GB stick holding a dozen installers, a memory tester and a rescue image, update a single ISO over the network, and never reflash. Competing writers destroy the drive contents on every change, which is why shops often keep a labelled stick per image. Ventoy collapses that into one. The project is written and maintained essentially by one developer, publishes under GPLv3, and has been criticised repeatedly because the Git repository contains prebuilt binary blobs that are not straightforward to rebuild from source. That has not been resolved to the satisfaction of distribution packagers, which is why Ventoy is absent from several official repositories. Organisations with software supply chain rules generally cannot approve it; individual technicians use it anyway because nothing else does the job as well.
What people use it for
- Field technicians who need one stick carrying several Windows and Linux installers plus a rescue environment
- Labs that reimage machines weekly and want to swap a single ISO rather than rewrite the drive
- Testing a new distribution release without destroying the existing set of images
- Unattended installation runs where answer files sit beside the ISOs on the same partition
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Ventoy.
- The repository ships prebuilt binaries that are difficult to reproduce from source, so several Linux distributions refuse to package it and security teams in regulated organisations will usually reject it.
- Development depends on one maintainer, so a period of inactivity leaves compatibility fixes for new distribution releases unaddressed with no second party able to cut a release.
- Secure Boot works only after enrolling the Ventoy certificate through MokManager at the machine, which is a manual step at every device and is blocked outright on locked-down corporate firmware.
- A small number of images still fail to boot in place and need workarounds, so a technician can discover mid-job that the one ISO they need is the one that does not work.
- The data partition is exFAT by default, which means no file permissions and no journal, so a stick pulled during a copy can corrupt the whole image set rather than one file.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Ventoy
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- VentoyvsbalenaEtcher
balenaEtcher: Pick balenaEtcher when the job is writing a single image to SD cards or USB reliably across macOS, Windows and Linux with verification.
Pricing
What Ventoy costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Ventoy
Free
- Full feature set with no paid edition
- GPLv3 licence
- Windows and Linux installers
- No account, telemetry or activation
Capabilities
Features
In-place ISO boot
Boots image files directly from the data partition without extraction
Persistent overlays
Attaches a writable overlay file to live Linux sessions so changes survive reboot
Plugin configuration
A JSON file controls menu order, aliases, themes and auto-install answer files
Secure Boot support
Ships a signed shim that requires enrolling the Ventoy key through MokManager on first boot
Multi-format boot
Handles ISO, WIM, IMG, VHD, VHDX and EFI payloads from the same menu
Non-destructive install
Upgrading the bootloader leaves the data partition and its images untouched
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Can I still use the USB stick for ordinary file storage?
Yes. The data partition mounts as normal removable storage and files that are not bootable images are simply ignored by the menu.
Do I need to reinstall Ventoy when a new distribution version comes out?
No. Delete the old ISO and copy the new one. You only rerun the installer to upgrade Ventoy itself.
Is it safe to use in a company that audits open source?
Often not. The unreproducible prebuilt binaries in the repository are a genuine audit finding and have blocked approval at organisations with supply chain review.
Keep looking
Where to go from Ventoy
- Ventoy alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Ventoy pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Ventoy badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Utilities softwareThe full category
- Best Utilities softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
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Compare Ventoy with
- balenaEtcher
- Rufus
- Maccy
- BetterTouchTool
- CCleaner
- Magnet
- Rclone
- GParted
- Deluge
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- Paste
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Ventoy, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
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