Cloning Software?

What is the Best Cloning Software that is reasonable on price and will do the job, I am cloning my PC harddrive to and external Storage drive formatted to NTFS and in the future would like to boot from that or wipe my PC harddrive and clone from the external storage device, this is a brand new installation will all the programs and software installed, would like to everynow and then wipe my harddrive and start fresh again with all my program already installed, I have tried norton ghost 12, acronis, clonemax, all seem good software but the price is the catch just look for a dependable program for the price