The Best Toaster Oven (2025), Reviewed By Our Experts

But what really sets this oven apart from the earlier model, the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, is the companion app. More often than not, small appliance companion apps are more trouble than they’re worth. But the Breville+ app is an exception to the rule. Developed in collaboration with the food nerds at ChefSteps, the Breville+ app has all the features you’d expect from a culinary companion app, including mobile alerts for preheat and complete, and the recipes are super user-friendly with illustrated ingredient lists and any required extra equipment listed up front. The best part, though, are the step-by-step photos and videos that accompany each recipe.

And these recipes are really very good—and developed specifically for this oven’s capabilities. For example, croissants made from scratch, air-fried zucchini fries, and even a rotisserie-style whole chicken that cycles through 13 different cycles using the bake, broil, and convection settings.

After all of that, if you just want to turn a knob and push a button on the control panel to make some toast, you can do that too.

Finally, most of Breville’s small appliances come with a one-year warranty, but the Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro has a limited two-year warranty, and if you purchase your oven directly from the brand you can buy additional coverage.

Read our full full review of the Breville Joule Oven.

This is a large, pricey piece of equipment, especially if you’re comparing it to more traditional toaster ovens. With a footprint of 21.5 by 17.3 by 12.8 inches, it’s about the size of a big microwave—but considering the fact that it can replace your toaster, air fryer, slow cooker, and dehydrator, we believe both the size and price are justified.

The best small toaster oven (and our budget pick): Panasonic Flash Xpress Toaster Oven

If the Breville Joule oven sounds like a lot (and it is, in so many ways) and you want something smaller, simpler, or cheaper, we recommend the Panasonic FlashXpress Toaster Oven.

This quirky, compact oven features a double-infrared heating element that significantly speeds up cooking times compared to comparable ovens. It gave us deep tan toast in just minutes, and using the pizza preset, our frozen pie was practically perfect. Unfortunately, the oven itself isn’t perfect—it gets so hot that cookies overcooked quickly—but once you get used to how powerful it really is (and adjust the temperature accordingly), it’s a great addition to your kitchen. Especially if you’re short on counter space.

At just 12”x13”x10.25”, it has a much smaller footprint than the Breville, but as its name suggests, it is pretty flashy. The control panel features imagery of the food it suspects you’ll be making (e.g., toast or frozen pizza) and a light turns on and off during use, almost in a chit-chatty way, but it’s really the oven’s smart sensor turning the heat on and off to regulate the target temp.

There’s only one rack position, but it’s connected to the door and conveniently pops out when you check your food—and you can still remove the rack (and the crumb tray) for cleaning.

We don’t love everything about this toaster oven but we got used to what we didn’t love. For example, though you can set the temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit, the oven favors Celsius; evidenced by settings for 355ºF or 390ºF and not standard Fahrenheit cook temps like 350º and 375º. But perhaps the most annoying thing is the automatic shutoff after 25 minutes—the timer’s max. If you want to cook anything longer than that, you need to start it again.That really makes this a more traditional toaster oven and not the kind of multi-functional appliance that can slow cook or roast large proteins.

How we tested toaster ovens

Even the most basic toaster oven models can bake, roast, broil, defrost, and, of course, toast bread. Many can do a lot more. We evaluated each toaster oven’s the functionality with the following tests:

What we looked for

Other toaster ovens we tested

Until the Breville Joule Oven entered the picture, this Breville Smart Oven Compact Convection was our long-time top pick. It’s consistent, easy to use, and has plenty of thoughtful features, including a Fahrenheit-to-Celsius converter, a button to tell the oven you’re cooking or air-frying frozen food, and, when using a preset, the oven displays how long the cooking or toasting cycle will take. In our testing, it has consistently turned out great toast, cookies, pizza, and chicken and other than our current top pick, the Joule Oven, it gives us more control over our cooking and toasting than any other toaster oven we’ve tested. Though compact (15″x17″x10″) it has a larger capacity than the Breville Mini Smart Oven and is roomy enough to hold an 8×8″ baking pan, a 12″ pizza, and a quarter sheet pan with a generous piece of salmon. It’s perfect for anyone who wants a smart, but not-too-techy countertop oven without the bulk you get from higher-end models.

If you want a Breville oven with more features and capacity than the Breville Smart Oven Compact Convection above, but you’re not quite ready to invest in the Breville Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro, this Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro is the way to go (I know, I know, the similar names don’t help). In fact, compared to the pricey Joule Oven, the only thing it’s really missing is the app connectivity. Other than being a little bit smaller, it’s nearly identical to the Joule in terms of features, and price point, and it has basic and advanced cooking functions including toast, bake, roast, slow cook, and dehydrate. It also has a preheat mode and you can switch between convection or super convection at the push of a button. It gave us ultra-crispy chicken tenders and tater tots, as well as practically perfect frozen pizza. Like all of Breville’s countertop ovens, it’s intuitive to operate, and we like the haptic knobs and sleek stainless steel body (a brushed stainless steel model is exclusively available from Williams-Sonoma).

We didn’t like the Ninja Foodi (DT201) as much as any of the Breville ovens we tested, but this countertop cooker did prove to be a great air fryer-toaster oven combo. Like Breville’s control panels, this one let us adjust cook times based on how many slices of bread we were toasting and how brown we wanted it to get. It wasn’t quite as impressive in the baking department, especially recipes with short cook times, and preheating took longer than the 90 seconds the marketing copy had promised. That said, we were very pleased with crispy, perfectly golden-brown chicken tenders and tater tots we got when air-frying this thing. We also reheated cold delivery pizza (air fried for three minutes at 400ºF) with great success.

KitchenAid’s Digital Countertop Oven looks slick, has nine preset cooking functions, and features an easy-to-use digital interface—including a preheat function that alerts you when the oven has reached your target temp for roasting or baking. In our testing, it turned out some of the most evenly browned toast no matter where we put the bread on the rack (comparable ovens tended to make darker toast near the middle lighter toast near the edges). Though it didn’t make our food as crispy as the Breville ovens in air-fryer mode, we were still very impressed with the tater tots, pizza, and roasted chicken.

For years, this Hamilton Beach Stainless-Steel 4-Slice Toaster Oven has been a very close second to our budget pick, the Panasonic Flash Xpress. In our testing, this oven consistently, quickly, and evenly browned toast and its function and temperature dials are actually more intuitive than those on the Panasonic. But over years of testing, this oven just hasn’t performed quite as well or as efficiently (for example, it took nearly 20 minutes to bake cookies from frozen dough, whereas the Panasonic took 14 minutes). Still, it’s a decent little toaster oven—especially given the price (around $55 at the time of this update).

The aesthetic cube-shaped Our Place Wonder Oven comes in a handful of neutral colors and unlike comparably-priced digital ovens we’ve tested, it works more like a traditional toaster oven with a few extra features. It has only two rack positions and instead of digital controls, the interface features three manual knobs: temperature, cooking mode, and time. You can even hear the timer ticking as your food cooks. This stylish little oven can toast, bake, air fry, roast, broil, and reheat and there’s a (somewhat limited) steam bake option too, which we used successfully to bring stale bread back to life. It does run a little hot so in our testing we had to keep an eye on our food to ensure nothing burned, but we were super impressed with how it cooked frozen chicken tenders and roasted chicken thighs. Both were crispy and golden-brown outside yet remained juicy and tender on the inside. It’s one of the smallest toaster ovens we tested (11.5 inches wide) and very light weight, so if you’re looking for something cute that doesn’t take up a ton of counter space, it’s one to consider. Our Place also recently released a Large Wonder Oven, which we plan to test soon and we’ll update this review when we do.

The interface on the Oster Digital RapidCrisp Air Fryer Oven is simple and intuitive, but because there’s no preheat function, we had to manually wait for it to reach the target temperature (generally about three minutes) then add more time to the cook timer. There’s also no interior light, and for the price, that lack of a light, combined with the missing preheat feature, kept this one out of our top picks. It’s also kind of hard to clean. Performance-wise, the toast it turned out in the first round of testing was fine—as were the frozen pizza, baked goods, and even the roast chicken—but the more toast we made, the less consistent it was.

Though the specific model of the Cuisinart Convection Toaster Oven Air Fryer we tested (TOA-60) is no longer available, you can still get a very similar model—and they all seem to share the features we disliked in the TOA-60. For starters, there’s the top-heavy, tank-like design with controls set above the door. The analog dial timer also made setting and tracking specific cooktimes a challenge and we found that this oven ran very hot, resulting in burnt toast and unevenly-cooked pizza.

This air-fryer oven from the maker of Instant Pot is compact and worked well as an air-fryer and baked cookies in half the time, but in our testing, it repeatedly turned out uneven toast. It also cooked a frozen pizza in half the expected time, but before the entire pizza reached the target temperature of 165ºF, the edges were close to burned. The model we tested came with one rack, a fryer basket, and one baking sheet (newer models also come with Rotisserie attachments) but the sheet pan was a tight fit for the oven and scratched the interior of the oven. The instruction manual also wasn’t very clear and for the price ($250 at the time of publishing) it just doesn’t feel like a smart purchase.

This 4-Slice Toaster Oven from Black+Decker toasted its first two slices of bread evenly and quickly. But it seemed to retain too much heat and lack any functionality for regulating it, because in the second round of testing, it burned the toast. Considering the low price, we wouldn’t totally disqualify it, but in addition to running hot and being inconsistent, we didn’t love the overall design or the control knobs.

This Large Capacity Countertop 6-Slice Digital Convection Toaster Oven from Oster is, as its name implies, very large. Conspicuously large, really. In testing, we found the interface to be far from intuitive and it took five minutes and 15 seconds to make toast on the medium setting. And when we say toast, it was more like burnt bread. This one is definitely a hard pass, which is moot since it appears to have been discontinued since we tested it.

This Crux Digital Air Fryer Toaster Oven resembles the Breville ovens in looks and functionality, but it’s not quite as nice. There are two settings for the convection fan (regular and turbo for air-frying), and a removable air-frying basket and drip tray are included in the box. It also has a 24-hour timer so you can use it for slow cooking or dehydrating. But the control panel is a little too sensitive, especially when hot, and it beeps annoyingly loudly when you push a button or turn a knob. As of this update, this model appears to be discontinued.

Additional reporting by Wilder Davies.