Ventoy on macOS, and the three ways to actually get it

If you went looking for a Ventoy download for your Mac and came up empty, you weren’t missing anything. There is no official macOS build of Ventoy, and there hasn’t been one at any point.

You can check this yourself in about a minute, which is worth doing before you trust anyone’s guide. The project’s release page publishes three files per version: a Windows zip, a Linux tarball, and a live-CD ISO. There is no .dmg, no .pkg, and no Homebrew formula from the project. The installation documentation covers Windows and Linux only.

It is also not obviously coming. The most-requested macOS issue on the project, Disk Maker under macOS, is closed, and people are still asking about it years later. Plan around its absence rather than waiting.

The good news is that a Ventoy drive is just a disk layout. Nothing about it requires the official installer, so several tools can produce one, and a drive built on a Mac is the same drive you would have got from Windows.

Your three options

Option	Cost	Good for
Boot the Ventoy live CD in a VM	Free	One-off use, if you already run VMs
Mactoy	Free, open source	Ventoy drives and raw image flashing, on a Mac
BootForge for Mac	Free	Ventoy drives on a Mac, with a phone app that manages the same drive

Option 1: run the live CD in a virtual machine

The project ships a live-CD ISO that boots into a Linux environment with the Ventoy installer already in it. Boot that in UTM, VMware Fusion, or Parallels, pass your USB drive through to the guest, and run the official installer inside.

This is the only route that uses Ventoy’s own binaries end to end, so if you want the reference behaviour and nothing else, this is it. The cost is the setup. You need a working VM, and USB passthrough of a raw disk is the part that most often goes wrong on a Mac. For a drive you build once and keep, it’s fine. For a Tuesday afternoon, it’s a lot of work.

Option 2: Mactoy

Mactoy is a native macOS app that installs Ventoy to a drive without a VM. It is free and open source under the MIT licence, notarized, and actively maintained. Alongside Ventoy installs it also flashes raw images, so it covers .iso, .img, .img.xz and .img.gz writes the same way balenaEtcher does.

We are not going to pretend it doesn’t exist or bury it below our own app. If open source is a requirement for you rather than a preference, or you want one tool that both installs Ventoy and raw-writes single images, Mactoy is the better fit and you should use it.

Option 3: BootForge for Mac

BootForge for Mac is our native macOS app. It is free to download, signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, and it updates itself. It is not open source, and we’d rather say that plainly than have you find out after installing.

What it does on a Mac:

• Prepare a drive as a Ventoy drive, erasing it.
• Update the Ventoy version on a drive without touching the files already on it.
• Reinstall when a drive has gone wrong, which is a full destructive install.
• Remove Ventoy, returning the drive to a single ordinary exFAT volume.
• Add an image to a prepared drive, and list what’s already on it.

It detects a connected drive and reads the Ventoy version actually written to it, so you can see what you have before changing anything.

What it does not do, because this is where people pick the wrong tool: it does not raw-write a single image to a drive. If your job is “put this one Linux ISO on this stick and nothing else”, BootForge is not the shortest path and Mactoy or balenaEtcher will serve you better.

Ventoy itself is GPL software, and BootForge does not bundle it. The app downloads the Ventoy assets from the project when you first ask for an operation that needs them, verifies them against a known SHA-256 hash, and refuses to proceed if the hash doesn’t match. The in-app licence notice links the corresponding source.

Requirements: macOS 14.0 or later, Apple Silicon or Intel. The download is around 4 MiB.

Download BootForge for Mac — free, direct from us, with the checksum published alongside it so you can verify what you got.

Why is there no Mac App Store version?

Because Apple’s App Store rules don’t permit what the app has to do. Writing a Ventoy drive means opening a raw disk device and writing to it as root, through a privileged helper. Sandboxed App Store apps cannot do that, so no tool of this kind can ship there. Any Mac app that builds bootable drives is a direct download, ours included. That is also why you’ll see a Gatekeeper prompt on first launch, which is normal for notarized software downloaded outside the store.

The part most Mac guides leave out

You may not need a computer at all.

The reason people search for Ventoy on macOS is usually a target PC that needs an operating system on a USB stick, not an attachment to the Mac specifically. An Android phone with an OTG adapter can build the same drive, which is worth knowing if the Mac is not where you are.

That matters most for Windows installers. If you’re trying to make a Windows install USB, the phone route is covered in Make a Windows 11 install USB from an Android phone, and the general case is in Make a bootable USB from your Android phone.

Drives are interchangeable between the two. A drive prepared on a Mac can have images added from the phone later, and the other way round, because both are writing the same Ventoy layout.

Common questions

Will a drive built on a Mac boot a PC normally? Yes. The layout doesn’t record what built it. The usual boot problems on the target machine, meaning Secure Boot, UEFI versus Legacy, and Fast Boot, are the same ones you’d hit with a drive built on Windows. See Troubleshooting boot problems.

Can Ventoy boot macOS installers? That’s a different question from installing Ventoy on a Mac, and the answer is largely no. Booting Apple’s own installers from a Ventoy menu is not supported, and the requests for it on the project remain open. Ventoy’s job here is booting Linux, Windows and rescue images from a drive you happen to have built on a Mac.

Can I install Ventoy with Homebrew? Not from the project. There is no official formula, and anything you find under that name is someone else’s packaging.

Will this erase my USB drive? Preparing a drive erases it completely, whichever tool you use. Adding images to an already-prepared drive does not. Check you’ve selected the drive you meant to before confirming, because that mistake is not recoverable.

Does it work on Intel Macs? Yes, on macOS 14.0 or later.

Before you start

• Download your ISOs from the publisher’s own site. Tampered images from mirrors and file-sharing sites look identical to good ones. Checking the published checksum takes a minute and is worth it, see Verifying checksums.
• Move anything you care about off the USB drive first.

Legal notes

BootForge is an independent application. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Ventoy project, and it uses Ventoy under that project’s licence. Mactoy, balenaEtcher and EtchDroid are separate projects with no connection to BootForge, mentioned here because they are the relevant alternatives. Ventoy, macOS and Mac are the property of their respective owners.