Clonezilla vs Serva
Clonezilla
clonezilla.orgServa
vercot.comSide by side
| Figure | Clonezilla | Serva |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $7.67/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 2 |
| Spec score · OS Deployment Software | 8.7 (#3) | 7.6 (#15) |
| Spec score · Bare Metal Provisioning Software | 8.7 (#3) | 7.6 (#16) |
| Purpose | Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging and cloning program for system deployment, bare metal backup, and recovery. | Serva is an automated PXE server solution for network booting and installing operating systems. |
Plans
In their own words
Clonezilla
Clonezilla is a free, open-source program for imaging and cloning partitions and disks for system deployment, bare-metal backup, and recovery. Clonezilla live is suited to one machine; lite server and Clonezilla SE can clone many computers at once, with the site describing 40-plus computers. It saves and restores used blocks on supported file systems and uses sector-to-sector copying for unsupported ones. Listed file systems include Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD, Minix, and VMware formats, including ext4, NTFS, APFS, and VMFS3/5. Images can be kept on a local disk or SSH, Samba, NFS, or WebDAV servers, and can be encrypted with AES-256. Clonezilla SE supports multicast, while lite server supports BitTorrent deployment. Clonezilla live supports BIOS or UEFI boot and MBR and GPT. It requires an x86 or x86-64 processor, 196 MB RAM, and a boot device. The destination partition must be at least as large as the source. Differential and incremental backups and online imaging are not implemented; images cannot be mounted or explored for direct individual-file recovery.
Serva
Serva is a Windows application for automated PXE network booting and operating-system installation. Its portable package bundles HTTP, FTP, TFTP, DHCP, proxyDHCP, BINL, DNS, SNTP, and SYSLOG services, plus a TFTP client. It delivers Windows and non-Windows assets to BIOS and UEFI systems, including ARM 32-bit and 64-bit UEFI. ProxyDHCP is intended to provide PXE service without changing existing DHCP infrastructure settings. For Windows deployment, Serva offers a WAIK/ADK-independent alternative to RIS and WDS and includes a Task Sequence Manager for capturing and deploying PC images. It requires no installation and does not save keys in the Windows registry. The free Community edition is for personal, non-commercial use, limits PXE/BINL service to 50 minutes and two PXE clients, and excludes WinPE booting and Task Sequence Manager. Professional costs $92 a year, permits commercial use, supports 50 PXE/BINL clients, and provides unlimited PXE/BINL service time.