Best for: Those who want an oven-style air fryer that looks great on the counter.
How we tested and selected the best air fryers
We have spent countless hours over the past few years researching, testing, and retesting popular air fryers from top-name brands, including Breville, Cuisinart, Ninja, Philips, and Cosori. When we tested these machines, we cooked various foods, including hand-cut fries, slices of zucchini, halved brussels sprouts, cubes of marinated tofu, chicken breasts or thighs, salmon fillets, and myriad frozen foods in each model (sweet potato fries, tater tots, and veggie burgers). We assessed the following factors.
We also solicited enthusiastic recommendations from our own Test Kitchen editors and recipe developers who use air fryers both in their Bon Appétit work and in their own homes.
We cooked salmon fillets and chicken breasts or thighs in each air fryer, taking note of how crispy each piece of protein got, how juicy it stayed, and how evenly it cooked.
We cooked a batch of Brussels sprouts to test how each fryer handled moisture. We looked for crisp edges and tender—but not mushy—interiors.
We crisped up cubes of marinated tofu to see if the air fryers could deliver crunchy, golden brown nuggets with soft interiors—and no stickage in the process.
We cooked an entire package of frozen sweet potato fries to see how each model handled cooking food from frozen (and the requisite moisture doing so creates).
What makes a good air fryer?
This was one of the most crucial things we evaluated. We wanted to assess if each machine could crisp food better than your average oven.
While an air fryer basket needs to get shaken or stirred at least once while cooking, we also wanted to make sure each model produced evenly browned and crunchy results—we didn’t want to see any fries that are super crunchy on one end and raw on the other.
While a lot of air fryers come with additional presets, we focused mostly on how easy it was to set the time and temperature on each model. Was it a simple dial and few buttons or did it feature a confusing and hard to navigate interface?
Square- and rectangular-shaped air fryers tend to offer more surface area than round ones. We also preferred models with fewer interlocking pieces, which makes the air fryer easier to clean.
We took these machines apart and scrubbed them after we tested. Like we said above, in general, the fewer pieces there are to the air fryer, the easier it is to clean.
Some home cooks will want an air fryer that’s light, with a slim profile that makes it easy to store in a cabinet and take out only for occasional use. Others won’t mind a larger appliance that they can keep out on their countertop, especially since a larger machine can accommodate more food and likely offer more versatility. We looked for options that would suit both kinds of air fryer users.
Other air fryers we tested and liked
Instant Vortex Slim 6-Quart Air Fryer
This model from Instant was our previous top pick, and we still think it’s an excellent air fryer. Its design, although compact, offers a significantly larger cooking surface area than comparably sized air fryers, thanks to the shape of its basket. In practice, this meant our testers were able to fit an entire extra veggie burger patty (six total) compared to models of a similar size and generally cook more food in each batch without sacrificing any of the airflow that makes air-fried food so crispy.
The Philips almost took a top spot—almost. It’s got a generous capacity, the control panel is easy to navigate, and it performs well with minimal user intervention. In other words, you won’t have to do a lot of shaking or stirring to get crispy fries from the Philips. This model did have a smaller yet heavier basket. It’s also loud and harder to clean due to a bunch of interlocking parts. It’s a good air fryer, but with its higher price tag, we feel like there are better deals on this list.
Philips 3000 Series Single Basket Air Fryer
This newer model from Philips has a lot going for it: sleek touchscreen interface, helpful viewing window, and whopping 16 settings. It did very well in our testing, producing crispy tots, tofu, and fries, but we preferred the design and the interface of the Cosori and Instant models. If you’re looking for an air fryer with a window feature, we’d recommend going with the Instant ClearCook (which is slightly cheaper at the time of writing) unless you find this model at a discount.
Cuisinart Air Fryer Oven 6-Qt
The Cuisinart ran neck and neck with our top picks; It was easy to use, didn’t whir too loudly, included a nice preheat feature, and was about the same price. We also really liked the viewing window you could use to check the progress of your food. However, its deeper square-shaped basket has less surface area than something like the Instant Vortex Slim’s rectangular one, which limits its capacity.
Ninja DoubleStack XL 2-Basket Air Fryer
The DoubleStack takes the idea of a dual-basket air fryer to a whole new level—literally. Like the Vortex Slim, the DoubleStack’s design prioritizes using vertical space. It’s skinny with the baskets stacked on top of each other instead of side by side like most other dual models. This makes it narrow and tall instead of wide, but not so tall that you can’t nestle it under your cabinets. Despite its space-saving design, you don’t lose out on actual cooking space. The baskets are big enough to fit a chicken, and wire racks in each mean you can really maximize how much you’re cooking. (Though you do need to remain mindful of not overloading it with food, otherwise you’ll block the airflow and mess up the whole air-frying process.) You can also program the baskets separately and utilize the machine’s Smart Finish feature—which delays the start of the basket with the shorter cook—to have a whole meal ready at the same time. The one thing we didn’t like was the somewhat confusing interface.
Air fryers we don’t recommend
This Instant Pot air fryer model is a fine option if you need something with a smaller capacity. The rectangular shape of its basket made it easy to fit plenty of food inside. It is sleek and has a short profile, which are nice features too. The Vortex Slim just offered better performance.
Another budget-friendly option, the GoWISE is best for one person who’s making small amounts of food at a time. Filling it with a meal for two-to-four people results in food. One other thing to note: The GoWISE claims to be a 7-in-1 air fryer, which isn’t quite true. It doesn’t offer seven different cooking methods, but rather just presets to make things like chicken or fish.
This Ninja a basic basket air fryer. It’s lightweight and simple to use, and it does a nice job crisping up fries. The round shape of its basket, though, makes it less versatile than other models on this list. If you’re trying to cook raw proteins or a tray of vegetables, you give away a lot of space with a round basket.
The Vortex Mini performed as well as the Cosori in our compact air fryer testing. However, it’s louder, heavier, and bigger. It’s just an inch smaller than the “full-sized” Instant Vortext Slim.
While this Cosori performed as well as other inexpensive models, it didn’t offer many additional settings to enhance the cooking experience—though it does feature an app to monitor your cooking progress.
This air fryer from Midea features two different cooking zones, but unlike the dual basket Ninja AF101, one of those zones is a basket and one is a shallow oven. It did just fine in our testing, but didn’t outperform our top picks. We also found the digital interface that you use to set time and temperature a bit confusing. For a more comprehensive product review of this model, head over to our sister site Epicurious.
While the Dash looks cute with its retro silhouette and poppy colors, it just didn’t perform that well. Sweet potato fries came out soggy and greasy. Tofu cubes got crisped on one side but were raw on the other, and the round basket could only fit one veggie burger. The two dials, controlling time and temperature, also prevented us from getting more specific in the cook settings.
The Nuwave Brio uses a wire basket instead of a nonstick-coated or ceramic-coated metal basket, like most other air fryers. This made it a lot harder to clean. Plus, it has a confusing interface.
This oven-style air fryer from Panasonic performed well in our testing, but we found it frustrating to use for a few reasons. It has a whopping 12 different functions, but we wish there was more insight on the display as to what each of these functions truly means besides the variance in default temperature and time. The Air Fry mode only allowed us to select temperatures between 410℉–445℉, which seemed quite high for certain foods. We also disliked the automatic preheating period that we couldn’t bypass even if the oven was already hot (this was particularly annoying when we just wanted to tack on an extra few minutes after finishing a cooking cycle). If you want to do that, you have to take the extra step of once again pressing the start button after the preheating process in order to start the timed cook cycle.
Like all of DTC darling Our Place’s products, the Wonder Oven is cute. Unfortunately, it failed to impress us enough to earn our recommendation here. While it did fine at cooking tater tots and french fries, it produced unevenly browned, ultra mushy zucchini and tofu that never quite got the crisp exterior we were looking for. The analog controls are aesthetically pleasing, but make selecting an exact temperature impossible (and knowing when the unit is at temperature impossible too). It did, however, make a shockingly good fillet of crispy-skinned salmon.
FAQs
What is an air fryer? Is it just a convection oven?
An air fryer is a countertop oven that uses hot air, circulated by a fan, to give foods crisper textures than you can achieve in a regular oven or toaster oven. What makes an air fryer an air fryer is a built-in convection fan that blows the hot air around the food to crisp it up. It’s the combination of heat and moving air that produces the kind of crispy exterior you’d otherwise get from deep-frying or pan-frying. But unlike a deep fryer, an air fryer requires far less oil to achieve the desired effect—and it doesn’t leave your house smelling like a grease trap for days or weeks.
So, technically speaking, yes, air fryers are simply small convection ovens, but the most classic form of air fryer isn’t really oven-shaped. Products marketed as air fryers are traditionally egg-shaped, with small removable baskets that you shake, as you would a deep-frying basket, in order to get an even cook on, say, french fries or zucchini slices.
Whether you’re a purist and only consider products that contain baskets and have that classic round shape to be true air fryers, or you find the term air fryer to be stupid marketing jargon for a convection oven is up to you to decide. For the purposes of this review, we’ve included both toaster ovens that contain convection, or “air fryer” settings and the classic basket-containing air fryers.
What accessories should I buy for my air fryer?
