Best Toaster Ovens of 2024
These multitasking models are worth clearing counter space
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With air fryers, multi-cookers, and indoor grills all vying for a spot in your kitchen, a toaster oven has to work harder to earn its space on your countertop. Over time, these small but mighty appliances have evolved to go far beyond making a great piece of toast. They can roast vegetables, bake cookies, broil burgers, and reheat leftovers. Newer models even have features like air-frying and slow cooking; they can also work as a convection oven or dehydrator.
That means a good toaster oven can now “reheat casseroles, turn out a whole chicken, and bake a pizza with a crispy crust,” says Kenneth Sutton, the CR test engineer who oversees our toaster oven tests. And with the right technique, you can even cook an impressive meal (like these Caribbean dishes) and bring leftovers back to their original glory.
Because of its small capacity, a toaster oven heats up quickly, so it can replace the daily use of a conventional oven for smaller families and singles. Toaster ovens also come in handy when your kitchen stove is maxed out while entertaining.
But some work better than others. We recently tested three new toaster oven models—one from Proctor Silex and two from the popular cookware company GreenPan. We also retested a popular Breville model that has lived at the top of our ratings for years. Five years after our initial evaluation, it still wows, scoring high enough to make CR’s recommended list and hold on to its top spot.
Explore our toaster oven ratings to see how these and dozens of others performed in our tests. For more details on choosing the right toaster oven, consult our toaster oven buying guide. You can also read more about our top picks below, appearing in alphabetical order.
7 Best Toaster Ovens
Breville The Compact Smart Oven BOV650XL does quite well in our toasting tests but isn’t the strongest at reheating or baking. That means you can expect to get great color on slices of bread (rather quickly, too), but you may find cold spots in your reheated lasagna.
It does, however, find redemption in its ease of cleaning; it’s the only model in this roundup to excel in this area. In addition to traditional functions like baking, broiling, and toasting, it has presets for making pizza, baking cookies, toasting bagels, and roasting.
This toaster oven has three rack positions and offers a temperature range of 120° F to 450° F. Models in our ratings range from 650 to 1,800 watts, so this 1,800-watt model is at the top in terms of power, despite being on the smaller side. CR members have found Breville to be quite reliable. It’s one of just two brands (Panasonic being the other) that landed top-notch scores for both owner satisfaction and predicted reliability in our latest member survey on toaster ovens.
Is this toaster oven on the spendy side? Absolutely. But its appearance and features are quite the draw. Much like the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro (below), the Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro has 1,800 watts, three cooking racks, and an air-fryer function. But the Joule adds a keep-warm mode, making it easy to keep food hot until it’s time to eat. It also comes in black stainless steel for a $50 upcharge.
In our tests, this model does a middling job at reheating and baking despite its 80° F to 480° F temperature range. And its toasting time is subpar, like many toaster ovens in our ratings. But it does turn out a pretty good batch of toast with nice color. Other selling points: It’s easy to use and clean, it has hands-free voice activation compatible with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, and CR members who own Breville toaster ovens are quite happy with their purchase.
The 1,800-watt Breville The Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro is the crème de la crème of toaster ovens. Our recent retest of this model proves that. Yes, it’s pretty pricey, but its baking results, eight rack positions, and temperature range of 80° F to 480° F help to justify the cost. Beyond the basics, it has a convection option, a dehydrate function, and an air fryer that trims the fat from favorite foods. We tried it—both in our labs and at home in a staffer’s kitchen—and found that fresh chicken wings, frozen curly fries, and a variety of other foods turned out crispy outside and moist inside. Breville toaster ovens get a lot of love from users. The brand gets a high score for owner satisfaction, according to CR member surveys, as well as for predicted reliability.
With a temperature range of 120° F to 450° F, the 1,800-watt Breville The Smart Oven BOV800XL does a nice job baking food, reheating leftovers, and turning out an even batch of medium-brown toast. It’s a cinch to operate and easy to clean. Plus, CR members give the brand high praise for reliability and owner satisfaction, according to our most recent toaster oven survey. One minor drawback, though: Our testers found that this model is only so-so at toasting a single slice of bread to perfection.
If you’re looking for an air fryer toaster oven that’s not likely to break the bank, the three-rack Hamilton Beach Digital Sure-Crisp is a solid pick. It has a digital display and push-button controls, and can fit at least six slices of toast and a 12-inch pizza. It earns top marks in our tests when it comes to baking, full-batch toasting, and one-slice toasting. The temperature range of 170° F to 450° F means you can place food inside to simply keep warm or turn up the heat to get a nice char. The 1,500-watt toaster oven also comes with a rotisserie kit, so you can make a whole chicken without turning on your full-sized oven. And if you need to broil meat, fish, fruits, and vegetables, it can handle that too.
The KitchenAid KCO255BM does an excellent job of turning out perfectly browned toast, though you’ll be waiting a while to get it on your plate. Its push-button controls and digital display are user-friendly, and its interior won’t take too much elbow grease to clean. Messes are also easy to hide, given the dark tint on the oven door. With a temperature range of 150° F to 450° F, it can handle a host of functions including bake, broil, convection-bake, air-fry, keep warm, bagel, reheat, proof, and dehydrate. This large oven can also fit a 7-pound whole chicken (or two 3.5-pound birds) and a 9x13-inch pan. Our testers also note that the air-frying function works well, giving food the kind of crisp one would expect from rapid convection cooking. One caveat: It gets just middling marks for baking.
The Ninja 2-in-1 Double Oven DCT401 is an overall top performer, earning high to top-tier scores in nearly all of our lab tests. It stands out for its unique design—it’s two separate ovens in one—how easy it is to use, and how well it bakes and toasts. It’s the fastest-toasting model at the top of CR’s ratings. The one area where this 1,800-watt model falls slightly short is reheating, for which it receives just a middling score. Still, a temperature range of 100° F to 450° F, a digital display, an air-frying function, and the capacity to cook a whole chicken make this Ninja a pretty solid pick.
How We Test Toaster Ovens
Our engineers put toaster ovens through a series of rigorous lab tests. We assess how well these appliances deliver a nicely browned slice of bread and how well they’re able to toast a whole batch evenly. We also evaluate the range of color options for toast, from light to dark, and how easy the appliances are to use and clean. Last but certainly not least, we make sure they can reheat lasagna and bake a pan of cookies and muffins evenly.
But we don’t stop there. Each model’s Overall Score factors in brand reliability and owner satisfaction ratings gathered from CR’s 2019 and 2021 Summer Surveys of 40,690 toaster ovens. In these surveys, we included members who purchased a new machine between 2013 and 2021. What we found: Brand reliability varies widely, with only a handful of brands snagging an excellent rating for reliability.
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