Rufus

Rufus is a free, open source tool by Pete Batard that creates bootable USB drives from ISO images. It is a single portable executable (under 2 MB) that runs without installation. Licensed under GPLv3.

It runs on Windows only. If you need to create bootable USB drives on Linux or macOS, Balena Etcher or the dd command are alternatives.

Creating bootable drives

Select your USB drive, click SELECT to pick an ISO file (Windows, Linux, or other), choose your partition scheme (GPT for UEFI, MBR for legacy BIOS), and hit START. Rufus formats the drive and writes the image. The whole process takes about 7 to 9 minutes for a typical Windows ISO, which is faster than Microsoft's own Media Creation Tool.

Windows 11 bypass and other features

When you load a Windows 11 ISO, Rufus offers to remove the TPM and Secure Boot requirements, letting you install Windows 11 on hardware that Microsoft officially does not support. It can also download official Windows ISOs directly (click the download arrow next to SELECT). For Linux, Ubuntu based distributions support persistent storage, so changes you make in a live session survive reboots.

Who it is for

Rufus is the standard tool for creating bootable USB drives on Windows. If you install operating systems or create recovery media, you probably already use it. There is no real reason to use anything else on Windows for this task. Ventoy is worth knowing about if you want multiple ISOs on one USB drive.