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We live in the future now, so everything you thought you knew about toaster ovens is probably wrong—or at least outdated. Today, the best toaster oven does so much more than just toast bread, reheat leftovers, and broil tuna melts. Newer models are true multifunctional small kitchen appliances that threaten to make all of your other countertop cookers (and maybe even your full-size oven) obsolete. Many also function as air fryers thanks to added convection fans, which produce extra-crispy waffles, hash browns, french fries, and other frozen foods at the push of a button.
But with so many brands promising an upward of six…seven…eight cooking modes and who even knows how many presets, which toaster ovens actually deliver the perfectly cooked goods?
We tested a variety of models at different price points and landed a clear winner that truly does it all. While we were at it, we found a smaller, simpler, more affordable option to recommend too. Below, find our top picks—and keep reading for the specifics of how we tested and what to look for in a toaster oven.
Best toaster oven overall: Breville Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro
The Breville Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro (BOV950) is both an upgrade from our previous winner, the Breville Smart Oven Compact Convection (BOV670), and an update to the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro (BOV900). And though it may be more advanced than some people may think they need from a countertop toaster oven, it has the kind of functionality that grows on you until you wonder how you ever lived (or at least cooked) without it.
This oven has all of the not-so-basic features of the Smart Oven Compact Convection, including a convection fan, multiple rack positions with clear instructions for which one to use when, presets for traditional toaster oven foods like toast and bagels, and an easy-to-read backlit LED screen with a countdown timer. It also features Breville’s proprietary smart feature, Element IQ, which employs sensors to automatically adjust the oven’s temperature from its multiple heat sources as needed.
During testing the Joule Oven made consistently flawless toast, passed our pizza test with flying colors (it comes with a setting specifically for frozen pizza and can also bake fresh pizza), and produced chicken thighs with nice, crispy skin. Like the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, the Joule model also has an adjustable air-fry preset with two convection speeds, as well as a dehydrate function (it was fun to watch water accumulate on the door when we dried bread for croutons). But it’s capable of so much more, including foolproof proofing, baking, roasting, slow-cooking, and broiling.
Though it’s noticeably bigger than toaster ovens of yore—21.5 by 17.3 by 12.8 inches, about the size of a microwave—it eliminates any reason for owning a separate toaster, air fryer, and dehydrator. You might even find you prefer this to a microwave for quick reheats on anything besides a cup of coffee too (please don’t put a coffee cup in the toaster oven). If you’re really looking to streamline your small kitchen appliances, the Joule Oven’s slow cooker function has two slow-cook settings and can be set for anywhere from four to 72 (!) hours so it just might inspire you to donate your old Crock-Pot too. And while we’re not saying you should replace your full-size oven with this countertop cooker, you technically could since it can accommodate a 9-by-13-inch baking pan, a 13-inch pizza, and a 14-pound turkey.
That sounds like a lot, but there actually is more.
Why we love the Joule Oven app
We often find small appliance companion apps to be more gimmicky and buggy than useful. Not so with the user-friendly Joule Oven app, which was developed by Breville along with the hard-core culinary nerds at ChefSteps. In fact, it’s what really sets the Breville Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro apart from its predecessors.
The Joule Oven app has the expected features like a mobile alert when the oven is preheated or when a cook has completed, and we love that the recipes include an illustrated list of ingredients as well as any extra equipment required, so you will never be caught off-guard halfway through making dinner. Even better, each recipe step has photos and videos to guide you through all of the prep.
The real value of the Joule Oven app, however, is in its execution of recipes like from-scratch croissants, air-fried zucchini fries, and even a rotisserie-style whole chicken. In the case of the croissants, the Joule’s AutoPilot mode automatically adjusts the oven for both proofing and baking. For the rotisserie-style chicken, this smart “toaster oven” cycles through 13 different bake, broil, and convection settings that no human would have the patience to manipulate manually—and likely wouldn’t be able to keep track of even if they tried.
After all of that, if you want to just push a button on the oven to make some toast, you can do that too. And that’s what really makes the Joule our top pick: Its versatility.
Read our full full review of the Breville Joule Oven.
The Joule Oven comes with multiple accessories, including a stainless-steel dehydrate/air-fry basket, a 13-inch nonstick pizza pan, two stainless-steel wire racks, a 9x13-inch enameled roasting pan, and a 9x13-inch broiling rack (while our experience tells us the racks are technically dishwasher-safe, the manual suggests hand-washing them). An additional bamboo board that sits on top of the oven and acts as a heat barrier can be purchased separately.
Unlike many of Breville’s small appliances, which come with a one-year warranty, the Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro has a limited two-year warranty, and additional coverage can be purchased if you buy directly from breville.com.
What we didn’t love about the Breville Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro
The two downsides to this oven are its cost and its size, though we believe both are justifiable by its quality and functionality. At the time of publication, the suggested retail price is $499, but when you consider the fact that it serves the purpose of at least three or four countertop appliances—and for many home cooks, it can practically eliminate the need for a conventional oven—it’s a worthy investment if budget and kitchen layout allow.
The best small toaster oven (and our budget pick): Panasonic Flash Xpress Toaster Oven
If you’re in the market for something smaller, simpler, or more affordable, we recommend the Panasonic FlashXpress Toaster Oven with Double Infrared Heating.
This compact oven’s double-infrared heating element significantly speeds up cooking times. Our bread was transformed into a deep tan toast in only two minutes, and using the pizza preset, our frozen pizza emerged with melted cheese and a crisp outer crust. But it’s not perfect. Cookies were nicely browned on the bottom but had to be removed earlier than the recipe specified due to the oven’s accelerated “abilities.” And while the Flash Xpress roasted chicken beautifully, the sputtering of fat did create a concerning amount of sizzle and a little smoke too (though we admit we didn’t follow the manufacturer’s instructions to wrap meat in foil before cooking.)
This quirky infrared-powered toaster oven has an R2-D2 vibe and cube-like proportions. At 12x13x10.25 inches, it takes up much less counter space than the Breville, but as its name suggests, it’s really quite flashy. The controls, which include an oven light and buttons with imagery of the food it suspects you’ll be making (e.g., toast or frozen pizza), are lined along the bottom and the door is situated on top, a feature that puts the food closer to eye level. A light also turns on and off during use, as if the oven is chatting with you—though it’s actually the work of a smart sensor, which turns the heat on and off automatically to maintain a desired temperature.
There’s only one groove for positioning the wire rack, which takes the guesswork out of where it should go for different cooking functions. The rack is connected to the door, too, so it pops out automatically when you check your food, eliminating the need to pull it out while wearing a bulky oven mitt. Both the rack and the crumb tray can be removed for cleaning.
As with most of our product review budget picks, saving some money usually means sacrificing features or functionality—and this is certainly the case with toaster ovens. The Panasonic doesn’t come with nearly as many accessories as the Breville (there’s no app, either), but there is an included 9-inch-square baking tray. This oven also has a one-year limited manufacturer’s warranty on parts and labor.
What we didn’t love about the Panasonic Flash Xpress Toaster Oven
There are some persnickety things about the Panasonic that take getting used to. For example, the temperature can be set in Celsius or Fahrenheit, but the oven clearly favors Celsius, as there are settings for 355ºF or 390ºF and not the more standard Fahrenheit temps like 350º and 375º. Additionally, the timer only goes up to 25 minutes, at which time the oven automatically shuts off, so if you want to cook anything for longer than that, you’ll need to set it more than once.
How we tested toaster ovens
A toaster oven can bake, roast, broil, defrost, and, of course, brown bread—and some can do a whole lot more. To evaluate these multitasking functions, our testers cooked the following:
We started by toasting two slices of bread on each machine’s medium setting. Immediately after the first round, we filled each toaster’s rack to maximum capacity (four to nine slices, depending on the size of the oven) to see how evenly the bread browned in back-to-back batches of varying sizes. We also wanted to see if the oven’s residual hot air affected the second round. Additionally, we timed how long it took to toast the bread on whatever counted as the oven’s “medium” setting. Most of all, we were looking for a machine that toasted consistently as an indicator of its capability for even cooking.
We made chocolate chip cookies from scratch, portioned them out, and froze overnight. Then we baked four to a rack the next day. For both the pizza and cookie tests, we used the baking sheets that came with the respective toaster ovens.
We cooked personal frozen pizzas following the instructions on the box. If an oven had a preset “pizza” setting, we used it. If it didn’t, we set the temperature controls manually or used the broiler setting. For the devices that didn’t have preheat settings or indicators, we heated each for five minutes before baking.
If the machines were marketed as air fryer–toaster oven combos, we also attempted to crisp up straight-from-the-freezer tater tots and chicken tenders.
If an oven performed well in the first three tests, we moved it on to the meat round and roasted a chicken thigh and leg—each simply coated in olive oil and seasoned with salt and pepper.
Factors we evaluated
When making toast—a toaster oven’s primary function—we looked for even color on both sides of the bread. In back-to-back rounds of toasting, we were especially concerned with whether or not the toast would burn.
We looked at how consistently, evenly, and efficiently each oven cooked a variety of foods. When reheating frozen pizza, we wanted a crispy bottom, evenly melted cheese, and a browned crust. For the cookies, we wanted melty insides, golden exteriors, and crispy edges. When roasting chicken, we looked for crispy, golden skin and juicy meat that was cooked throughout. We also paid attention to whether or not the oven’s presets performed as expected.
Beyond the necessary basic rack, we looked at what accessories came with each oven. Some were very limited, while others included extra racks, baking sheets or trays, roasting racks, and air-fry baskets.
Theoretically, a toaster oven is an easy-to-use appliance, so we looked for user-friendly control panels and gave preference to those with intuitive knobs or buttons and backlit LCD digital displays. We also considered how hard or easy it was to clean each oven and how much effort it took to remove and replace the removable crumb tray.
Any appliance that’s going to live semi-permanently on the counter needs to be worth whatever space it takes up. So for the bigger ovens, especially, we looked at whether they were functional and versatile enough to warrant everyday use and whether or not they could eliminate the need for other countertop cookers.
Other toaster ovens we tested
Until it was unseated by the Breville Joule, the Breville Smart Oven Compact Convection was our long-reigning product test winner thanks to its consistency, ease of use, and thoughtful features. It has a Fahrenheit-to-Celsius converter, a button that tells the oven you’re cooking something frozen, and an indicator that shows you how long the cooking or toasting cycle will be. This oven produced consistent results when we made toast, cookies, frozen pizza and chicken, and save for the Joule Oven, it gives the user more control than any other toaster oven we tested. With a footprint of of 15x17x10 inches, the compact oven is big enough to bake an 8x8-inch pan of brownies, cook a 12-inch pizza, or roast a generous piece of salmon, but small enough to be reasonably discreet. If you’re not interested in the app connectivity of the Joule Oven, but still want the quality and smart features of a Breville oven, this is a great option at a much lower price point.
Though we didn't like it as much as either Breville, the Ninja Foodi was still an excellent air fryer–toaster oven combo. Like the Breville ovens, the interface allowed us to customize the cook times based on how many slices we were toasting, as well as the level of browning desired. We had less success baking recipes with short cooking times, and not only because the preheat took longer than the 90 seconds the product copy promised. We were, however, very happy with the air fryer function on this oven; tater tots and chicken tenders came out beautifully crisp and golden brown. We also used the air fryer function to reheat cold pizza we’d had delivered the night before—just three minutes at 400° produced reheated pizza that tasted just as hot and fresh as it did when it showed up at our door.
Over the course of several years of testing, the Panasonic Flash Xpress has maintained its status as our favorite smaller, more affordable toaster oven—but only by a hair. Its top competitor, the Hamilton Beach Stainless-Steel 4-Slice Toaster Oven, has consistently browned slices of toast quickly and evenly. It also has more intuitive, no-nonsense dials for selecting temperature, function (toast, broil, bake), and time. Ultimately though, the Hamilton Beach didn’t quite perform as well as the Panasonic. For example, it took nearly 20 minutes to bake cookies from frozen balls of dough in the Hamilton Beach model versus just 14 in the Panasonic.
The Crux Artisan Series Digital Air Fryer Toaster Oven looks and operates similarly to the Breville ovens, but it’s not quite as nice. The convection fan has a regular setting and turbo setting for air-frying, and this model comes with a removable air-frying basket and drip tray. The oven can also run for up to 24 hours, making extremely slow-cooking and dehydrating very doable. Unfortunately, the knobs and buttons on the control panel are overly sensitive, especially while the oven is hot, and it beeps loudly every time you press a button or turn a knob. Despite its design flaws, it performed exceptionally well, though it lacks the precision of the Breville ovens.
The Oster Digital RapidCrisp Air Fryer Oven has a simple and intuitive interface. It made decent toast on our first try, however subsequent batches yielded inconsistent and disappointing results. It did a good job with frozen pizza, roast chicken, and baked goods, but ultimately, this oven makes countertop cooking more complicated than it has to be. The timer starts counting down as soon as you press “start,” and because it doesn’t have a built-in preheat function, we found we had to add three minutes or so to our cook times, then wait around to put the food in once the oven had reached the desired temperature. Additionally, it lacks an interior light and it’s harder to clean than many of the other models we tested.
The Cuisinart Convection Toaster Oven Air Fryer was truly disappointing. The bulky machine feels and looks like a tank, and for the price, it lacks finesse. The timer is on a dial, which made it difficult to tell how long we were setting it for, and we didn’t like the top-heavy design, with the controls set over the door, either. This oven also runs very hot. The medium setting for toast lasted a full five minutes and produced bread on the edge of burnt, and the cheese on the frozen pizza browned and puffed up instead of melting.
The Oster Large Capacity Countertop 6-Slice Digital Convection Toaster Oven is conspicuously large and has an inscrutable interface; even the manual didn’t specify the appropriate rack positions for different functions. As for performance, the medium setting for toast lasted a lengthy five minutes 15 seconds—and it resulted in burnt bread (you had one job, toaster oven!).
This sleek-looking oven from the maker of the ubiquitous Instant Pot has an intuitive touchscreen interface, and we were impressed with its air-frying capabilities. Unfortunately, it repeatedly ruined our toast, and while it did bake cookies in just five minutes instead of the expected 10, the browning was uneven and blotchy, like a bad spray tan. Likewise, a frozen pizza that should have taken 20 minutes to bake took only 10, but the edges got super dark before the pizza reached an internal temperature of 165°F. The instruction manual left us confused, too, and considering the price, the accessories are lacking. This machine comes with one rack, a fryer basket, and one baking sheet, which slides into the same grooves as the rack. But the included sheet pan is just a hair too wide, so it scratched the interior walls every time we slid it into the oven.
In our testing, Black + Decker’s 4-Slice Toaster Oven toasted the first two slices of bread quickly and evenly, but burned the toast on the second round. It did a respectable job considering its low price, but it ran hot and we didn’t love the design or the control knobs.
