Air fryers—even the best air fryers—may once have seemed like a fad or a clever bit of marketing, but at this point they've proven they've got staying power. And, actually, after testing and using them in their home kitchens over multiple years, even our food editors agree that air fryers will make quick work of many of your cooking tasks—like churning out extra-crispy chicken wings and blistered brussels sprouts in a flash, or bringing frozen fries and leftover pizza slices back to life.
“Healthy” versions to deep frying they are not. But if you think of these countertop appliances as mini convection ovens that do the work your toaster oven, and even your standard full-size oven—but faster and better, you'll quickly realize their usefulness. In the summer especially, we love using them to avoid turning on the oven.
With so many brands, models, and features to choose from these days, finding the best air fryer for your kitchen can be daunting. To help get you started in your search, we’ve rounded up our top picks for the best air fryers for home cooks. So whether you’re looking for a small air fryer you can tuck away when not in use or the best air fryer–toaster oven for roasting a whole bird—we know there’s an option you’ll love below.
The best air fryer overall: Instant Vortex Slim 6-Quart Air Fryer
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Large capacity; small countertop footprint; user-friendly interface; easy-to clean | Comparatively narrow temperature range (from 180°F–400°F) |
After extensive testing of 20 different air fryers on our sister site Epicurious, this model won out thanks to one simple factor that is essential to good air frying: surface area. The Instant Vortex Slim’s basket offers an extra eight square inches of cooking space compared to our long standing previous winner in the category, the Philips Premium Air Fryer. Despite this, the machine maintains a light weight and the same overall countertop footprint as the Philips. It does this, cleverly, with a long, narrow basket shape—it’s sort of the railroad apartment layout of air fryers.
As a result of those extra eight inches of space in the basket, this machine has almost double the capacity of other air fryers: In our testing, we fit 4 chicken breasts, 4 veggie burgers, 2 pounds of French fries, and over a pound of frozen nuggets in the basket without crowding or overlapping, which would impede crispiness. In smaller air fryers, you’d have to cook this amount of food in batches to get the level of browning and crispiness desired.
Space between food in an air fryer is essential because air frying is just a marketing term for convection cooking, which uses a fan to circulate hot air. That hot air needs access to the surface of every piece of food you’re cooking in order to make it crispy. It’s a classic “don’t crowd the pan” situation.
And this Instant model boasts a few other great design features as well: It has a well-designed, user-friendly control panel. It reminds you to flip or shake your food halfway through the cooking process (again, an essential element in air frying since you want maximum exposure on every food surface to the hot air that the machine circulates). There’s also a built-in preheat feature—the machine heats up quickly and gives you a notification when it’s hot enough to add your food. Our testers also found it easier to hand wash the interior of the machine than many of its competitors. And here’s the very best news: it’s half the cost of our former top pick.
The best splurge air fryer: Typhur Dome
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Extra large capacity; self cleaning; powerful heating; wide temperature range; unique aesthetics; good tech via Bluetooth connection and a useful app; long warranty | Expensive; heavy; low height makes large protein cooks hard |
Now if we’re really talking max surface area for max airflow, the Typher Dome takes large capacity to the next level with a comparatively gargantuan cooking surface area of 12.5 inches. We fit a 12-inch pizza, a whopping six slices of toast at one time, 20 chicken wings, and 10 slices of bacon in a single layer. You will sacrifice counter space here, though: This machine has a foot print 1.5 times bigger than the Instant model above.
But you may not mind sacrificing the space for such a cool looking machine. It manages to be both sleek and futuristic with a matte-grey finish, but also kind of...cute? The rounded edges and bubble-shaped display lend a kind of Wall-e or Jetson’s charm. And that interface is intuitive to use, and includes presets for common foods you’d want to air fry.
But the machine’s powerful heating system is really what takes it into the worthwhile splurge category. The machine doesn’t need to preheat, and in our testing it cooked French fries, chicken, and bread several minutes faster than we could in any other machine. It also has the ability to cook at lower temperatures (down to 140°F) than many of its competitors. This, along with the ample cooking space, makes it a really good dehydrator.
If you’re into this sort of thing, you can also connect the Typhur to your phone via Bluetooth and operate it via an app, which includes recipes and allows you to change your temperature or cook time remotely. A self-cleaning feature is also available through this app; you can program a 1-hour maintenance clean, or a 2-hour deep clean. This doesn’t mean you’ll never have to get in there with some good old fashioned dish soap, but preventing long-term grease buildup in the interior of your air fryer can be difficult, and this feature certainly helps with that.
The best small air fryer: Cosori Lite 2.1 Quart
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Low countertop profile; lightweight for easy storage; inexpensive; easy controls | Only room for 2 servings of food; few cooking functions |
If you’re the kind of person who just needs to heat up a solo serving of french fries or chicken for two, both the Typhur and Instant up above are going to be more air fryer than you need, and, depending on your counter and cabinet situation, more air fryer than you can actually handle. This mini model from Cosori is about the size of a couple of hardcover cookbooks set next to each other. But despite its diminutive size it definitely did the work. It crisped up frozen foods, browned veggies and cooked up veggie burgers (although you won’t be able to fit more than two patties in the basket at a time). The digital touchscreen interface is simple to set to any of the four cooking functions—air-fry, roast, bake, and reheat—and it weighs in at a featherlight 5 lb., so while it’s small enough you may not need to keep it stored away, it’s the one of the easiest air fryers out there to move in and out of a cupboard. That it costs only 50 bucks at the time of writing doesn’t hurt, either.
One thing to note: Even though the manual says the Cosori’s basket is dishwasher-safe, it’s got a nonstick coating, and we don’t recommend putting anything with a nonstick coating in the dishwasher.
The best air fryer–toaster oven: Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Most versatile cooking functions; large capacity; better performance than basket-style air fryers | Very big on the counter; high price point |
If you have the counter real estate and want an air fryer that can truly do it all, opt for the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro. This toaster oven–style air fryer is much-loved among BA staffers, and it’s the top pick for award-winning cookbook author Nik Sharma, who’s developed some of our favorite air fryer recipes. “I prefer toaster oven–style over basket-style air fryers, because they’re easier to use for more common tasks like baking, toasting bread, and roasting more efficiently,” says Sharma. He likes that this appliance is basically several appliances combined into one. While most basket-style air fryer models do have a few cooking functions in addition to an air fryer function, the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro simply performs all those tasks better—especially when it comes to baking, says Sharma. It has the most cooking functions we’ve seen in an air fryer with settings to toast, broil, bake, roast, dehydrate, slow-cook, reheat, and proof—and food-specific presets for things like pizza, bagels, and cookies. It’s also capital-R roomy: big enough to fit nine slices of toast, a 5-qt. Dutch oven, a 9x13" pan, and an entire 14-lb. turkey. If you’re looking for an air fryer that can do everything your regular oven can do plus more (and probably do those things better), this is your appliance.
If you want to get even more techy, Breville has the Joule Air Fryer Pro that has a range of automatic features and several different heating elements that can do things like mock up a very convincing rotisserie chicken.
There isn’t much to dislike about the Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro. Every dish we’ve prepared in this stainless-steel appliance—focaccia! nachos! meringue!—has turned out perfectly browned, evenly cooked, and deliciously crisp. The only downsides we can think of are its large countertop footprint and its high price tag compared to more petite air fryer options. If neither of those are an issue for you, then we’d say it doesn’t have any downsides at all.
The buzziest air fryer: Our Place Wonder Oven
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Cute countertop appeal; excellent crisping and baking performance | Slightly tricky old-school dial interface; temperature variability |
Our Place has mastered a social media–friendly aesthetic for its pots and pans, so it was not a shock that, when the brand made a move to small appliances and released an air fryer–countertop oven with the adorable moniker the Wonder Oven, that it began showing up in the feeds of our editors (Our Place also released a pressure cooker/slow cooker/Instant Pot type machine called the Dream Cooker). Commerce editor Carina Finn put the Our Place air fryer to the test and found it to be much more than a marketing gimmick that just happened to resemble a giant Easy Bake Oven. It perfectly crisped up frozen pizza rolls, the bare minimum for an air fryer, but it could do so much more, impressively crisping the skin of a whole roast chicken and even baking crusty French bread with the help of a steam infusion setting, which helped produce a crisp crust and a wonderfully soft crumb.
One thing to note about the Wonder Oven, though, is that it is decidedly not a digital air fryer. The interface uses old-school dials that produced temperatures that could vary by as much as 10 degrees from their setting. But ultimately, though it looks like a toy, Finn found it performed professionally. She said people sent her DMs begging her to tell them the Wonder Oven wasn’t as good as it looked, and unfortunately for them, she had to respond that “they might look like dollhouse accessories, but it is a serious appliance” that can best a number of full-size ovens.
How we tested and chose the best air fryers
First and foremost, we chose the best air fryers by consulting the testers at our sister site Epicurious, who have spent countless hours over the course of five years testing the most up-to-date machines. Since 2019 they’ve cooked a wide range of dishes that are commonly made in the air fryer, like French fries, vegetables, tofu, salmon, chicken, and veggie burgers in these air fryers, assessing and comparing factors like cook time, level of crispiness, ease of use, design features, capacity, ease of cleaning, and the size, weight, and mobility of the machine.
We also supplied air fryer recommendations from editors in our test kitchen and recipe developers we work with—the ones that have gotten extensive use in the process of developing air fryer-centric recipes on our site and others. But since we know a lot of us simply use air fryers to heat up frozen foods for our kids (or ourselves after a busy work week!), we also made sure to solicit recommendations from our editors who were using these machines at home, in their regular lives.
What exactly is an air fryer?
An air fryer is essentially a mini countertop convection oven, which means it uses a fan to help circulate hot air around your food so that it cooks more evenly than in a normal “conventional” oven. With convection ovens, the overall cooking times get reduced—and this is even truer in an air fryer, because it is both smaller and circulates air better than a regular oven. Air fryers preheat in minutes (some, like the Philips Premium XXL, don’t need any preheating at all) and make cooking convenient, mostly hands-off, and so, so crispy. You can find these machines in different styles (like basket-style, dual basket–style, or toaster oven–style) and in a variety of sizes that can handle one serving or up to six servings.
Basket-style air fryers vs. toaster oven–style air fryers
Generally, there are two types of air fryers: basket-style units or toaster oven–esque ones. Each comes with its own pros and cons. Ask yourself: How much counter space are you working with? Do you usually cook food for just yourself or a family of five? Will you primarily use it for heating up frozen foods like french fries or more significant cooking tasks like roasting chicken? Would you prefer to store your air fryer away in a cabinet when it’s not in use or leave it on the counter for convenience? All these questions come into play when deciding which style air fryer is best for you.
Toaster oven–style air fryers can, well, double as toaster ovens. Because they’re so big, they’ll usually live on the counter—whereas a smaller basket-style model could be stashed away when not in use.
What size air fryer do I need?
When choosing an air fryer size, there are really only two things to think about: How many people you’ll be feeding and how much space you have. Here’s how we would break down the sizing:
2–3 quarts: These compact air fryers are perfect for individuals or couples. Fair warning: They’re probably won’t be leftovers.
4–5 quarts: This will serve 2–4 people.
6–8 quarts: Larger air fryers like this will easily serve 4–6. Consider these larger versions, as well, if you plan to prepare whole chickens, roasts, or other large items.
10 quarts: A behemoth like this is perfect if you regularly entertain or want to use your air fryer to batch cook.
Is air-frying healthy?
Air-frying is ingenious marketing; it sounds so light, so fat-free, so…noncaloric. But it is not “healthy” in a specific way. Air fried food uses a lot less oil than the deep-fryer, but were you really deep-frying that much before? It makes roasted vegetables and salmon in a flash, which maybe means you’ll eat more of them. But if you’re looking to make some changes in your eating habits, you should talk to a registered dietitian, not your toaster oven.
Our favorite air fryer recipes
Now that you've gone through all the air fryer reviews, here are some of our best air fryer recipes to get you started. Once you invest in one, we're pretty confident it’s going to quickly become one of your absolute favorite kitchen appliances—so best to start bookmarking recipes like these now.
Air Fryer Crispy Brussels Sprouts With Honey Butter
Crispy Air Fryer Potato Wedges With Yogurt-Tahini Sauce
Extra-Crispy Air Fryer Chicken Wings
Air Fryer Garlic Nori Fries
Air Fryer Sesame Coconut Chicken Tenders
Read about some of our other favorite small appliances and kitchen gadgets, including a see-through Dash toaster, a perfect waffle iron, and the very best blender.