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We’re planning to test the Our Place Wonder Oven soon. It’s pricier than our small toaster oven pick and much smaller than our air fryer toaster oven picks, but we’re curious how its cooking capabilities compare. Pizza Oven Restaurant
Today’s toaster ovens are like Mini Me versions of full-size ovens, and they’re useful for so much more than making toast. They preheat in just a few minutes and can do everything from reheating leftovers to baking a cake. Larger toaster ovens can even roast a beautiful, golden-brown chicken.
After many hours of testing since 2015—making stacks and stacks of toast, mini pizza bagels, and cookies—we recommend the small Panasonic FlashXpress Toaster Oven and the large Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven, depending on your space and needs.
Some toaster ovens (ones with convection technology, like our larger pick) can even work with air frying recipes, though that may require some adjustments. But if you’re looking to do a lot of air frying in your toaster oven, you may want to check out our separate guide to air fryer toaster ovens.
This compact toaster oven was among the best at evenly toasting bread, baking cookies, and bringing frozen foods to life. It performed as well as or better than competitors that cost significantly more.
This Cuisinart model provides impressively even cooking, a whopping nine-slice toast capacity, a three-year warranty, and some useful accessories.
This small, affordable oven is ideal for those who want something simple. It performed far better than the others we tested at this price level.
This convection toaster oven has a slightly more powerful fan for air frying than the Cuisinart model, plus convenient markings on the door and the easiest-to-clean interior. It also has additional settings for proofing bread, slow cooking, and dehydrating.
We tested toaster ovens by making toast and baking an assortment of food such as frozen snacks, chicken thighs, and cookies.
We used an AI-powered tool that scanned more than 6,500 customer reviews across nine toaster ovens to learn what people liked and disliked.
We’ve been long-term testing our picks to see how they hold up over the long haul—we’ve been using some models in our own homes since 2017.
The knowledge gained from hundreds of hours of testing since 2013 has helped us identify the most promising models to test each year.
This compact toaster oven was among the best at evenly toasting bread, baking cookies, and bringing frozen foods to life. It performed as well as or better than competitors that cost significantly more.
The Panasonic FlashXpress Toaster Oven is best for people who want a machine just for toast or other small jobs, like preparing a handful of frozen snacks. Impressively, it made toast faster than any other model we’ve tried. It cooked food evenly and didn’t generate any hot spots that would cause inconsistent toasting—it was also one of the only models in this price range that could evenly crisp the skin on chicken thighs.
This oven takes up very little space on a counter, but it’s still large enough to fit four pieces of sandwich bread or a slice of leftover pizza. For accomplishing bigger tasks, consider getting one of our other picks, the Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven or the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, each of which holds a 13-inch pizza or up to nine slices of bread.
This Cuisinart model provides impressively even cooking, a whopping nine-slice toast capacity, a three-year warranty, and some useful accessories.
The large Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven TOB-260N1 has nearly all of the capabilities of a full-size oven. It delivers even heat to up to nine slices of sandwich bread, a 13-inch frozen pizza, or a whole roast chicken (whereas the Panasonic FlashXpress Toaster Oven can fit only a handful of frozen snacks). The Cuisinart toaster oven’s three-year warranty is outstanding, as are its impressive accessories, which include a ceramic pizza stone. Like the Panasonic FlashXpress model, it was one of the fastest at preheating to 350 °F in our tests.
Since this model is so large (it measures roughly 20.5 by 13.25 by 11.25 inches), we recommend it for households with ample countertop space. And although it’s not marketed as such, it can also be used to air fry food (pod-shaped air fryers are simply mini convection ovens).
If you plan to air fry on the regular, you may want to consider getting our upgrade pick, the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, which has a slightly more powerful fan.
This small, affordable oven is ideal for those who want something simple. It performed far better than the others we tested at this price level.
The inexpensive Hamilton Beach 4 Slice Toaster Oven toasted bread better than any other oven under $100. This no-frills model lacks many of the features included in our other picks—such as digital controls and preset cooking programs—but it heats evenly. The Hamilton Beach toaster oven’s humble size makes it ideal for kitchens with limited counter space, but it’s still large enough to fit four slices of bread.
It runs cooler than other models we tested, so you need to increase the temperature by about 25 degrees when baking or roasting. But that’s a forgivable drawback considering the low price.
This convection toaster oven has a slightly more powerful fan for air frying than the Cuisinart model, plus convenient markings on the door and the easiest-to-clean interior. It also has additional settings for proofing bread, slow cooking, and dehydrating.
If you plan to air fry often or don’t mind paying top dollar for a more polished overall experience, we’d recommend the snazzy Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro. This oven shares many of the same features as our main pick from Cuisinart, including a large oven capacity, two oven racks, and two convection fan speeds for more control over how you cook your food.
One of the main differences is that the Breville toaster oven’s fan is a bit more powerful and crisps up food faster. The oven also has just a slightly bigger cavity and comes with a few additional settings some people may find useful, including: proof, air fry, reheat, cookies, slow cook, and dehydrate.
However, if you don’t think you’d take advantage of these added features, you’ll probably be just as happy with the Cuisinart toaster oven, which costs much less.
Since 2016, I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching and testing toaster ovens for this guide. As a senior staff writer at Wirecutter, I’ve reviewed toasters, air fryer toaster ovens, pod-shaped air fryers, and deep fryers, among other kitchen gear and gadgets. This guide also builds on work by writer Brendan Nystedt.
To identify what made some models better or worse than others, we used an AI-powered analysis tool to scan 6,500-plus customer reviews across nine toaster ovens.
A toaster oven is a multipurpose appliance that lets you toast bread and bake or reheat food. We’d recommend getting one if:
We have picks for slot toasters, too. However, in our research, we’ve found that toaster ovens have a longer life expectancy. If you don’t have room for both appliances in your kitchen, we’d get a toaster oven instead.
Toaster ovens with convection and those marketed as “air fryer toaster ovens” are not very different. Both use a convection fan to circulate the hot air inside the oven, which can slightly reduce cooking times, and it has a dehydrating effect that makes foods crispier (it’s what air fryers use to “fry” food).
But air fryer toaster ovens typically have more powerful convection fans, which help them cook a bit faster and make food slightly crispier. If that appeals to you, or you’d find it helpful to have a dedicated air fryer setting, consider one of those instead. (Our upgrade pick, the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, is also the top pick in our guide to air fryer toaster ovens.)
But for many basic tasks, convection doesn’t make a huge difference. And any toaster oven with convection will hold more food and cook more evenly than a pod-shaped air fryer.
If you want an appliance that’s more versatile than a pod-shaped air fryer, we recommend the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro .
After testing 23 toasters for dozens of hours, we think the Cuisinart CPT-122 2 Slice Compact Plastic Toaster is the best, especially for the price.
After speaking with experts and spending years doing our own long-term testing since 2013, we look for these important qualities in a toaster oven:
While our testing procedure has evolved since we started covering toaster ovens in 2013, we’ve always started by filling each toaster with as many slices of basic white bread as we could, then setting each machine to toast at medium shade. The results give us a heat map of each oven, showing us how evenly each model toasted and if it had any hot spots.
We also made break-and-bake Toll House cookies and pizza Bagel Bites in each model, evaluating the finished product for color, consistency, and texture. To even the playing field, we didn’t use the convection setting on any of the models we tested (unless we were specifically comparing models that shared that feature).
Additionally, we baked chicken thighs in the finalists to see how well they could crisp up the skin.
Using an air probe thermometer, we monitored how well each oven maintained a set temperature.
We also tested the unique features on certain models, such as dehydrate and steam modes. We tested ovens with dedicated air fry modes, such as our upgrade pick, the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, with similar contenders for a separate guide—these models typically have larger, more powerful fans than toaster ovens with standard convection fans.
This compact toaster oven was among the best at evenly toasting bread, baking cookies, and bringing frozen foods to life. It performed as well as or better than competitors that cost significantly more.
We recommend the Panasonic FlashXpress Toaster Oven for people who want a small oven to make toast, prepare a few frozen snacks, or reheat a couple slices of pizza. We’re smitten with its adorable retro 90s design, and after years of long-term testing we continue to be impressed with its strong baking performance, compact size, and reasonable price.
It cooks evenly and quickly. The FlashXpress toaster oven cooked foods to an even golden brown better than most other models we tried in this price range (and beyond), and its toast shade settings were among the most accurate.
Most toaster ovens get hotter with every batch of toast you make, resulting in charred pieces of bread. This model compensates for the increased heat by automatically reducing the cook time, so the results are nearly the same every time. It was also among the fastest models we tested at making toast.
According to the manual, preheating isn’t necessary, but when cooking things other than toast, we’d recommend waiting a couple of minutes for the unit to heat up for best results.
It’s roomy without taking up too much space on your counter. The Panasonic FlashXpress Toaster Oven measures just over 1 cubic foot, so it’s a great option if you have limited counter space. You can’t cook a 13-inch pizza in it, but it has plenty of space for a small slice or two and up to four cookies. It can also just fit a 9-inch round or 8-by-8-inch square cake pan.
It has several extra features that are uncommon for toaster ovens at this price level. It has hooks on the door that help eject the wire rack, which make it easier to retrieve your food. The oven also beeps when the cycle has finished and turns itself off automatically, and it has an oven light—an anomaly for such a low-cost toaster oven.
It’s covered by a one-year warranty. Unlike the manufacturers of our other picks, Panasonic sells replacement parts for many of the oven’s components (including the heating elements, power button, and door handle).
This Cuisinart model provides impressively even cooking, a whopping nine-slice toast capacity, a three-year warranty, and some useful accessories.
The versatile Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven TOB-260N1 is one of the best toaster ovens we’ve found for bigger jobs, like cooking a 13-inch pizza, roasting a whole chicken, or toasting up to nine slices of bread at once.
It toasted bread more evenly than the other toaster ovens we tried at this price level, and it has a better warranty, more accessories, and one of the shortest preheating times. Plus, the two-speed convection fan means it’s also good at air frying (even though it’s not advertised to do this).
It toasts to a near golden-brown perfection. Corner to corner, no other oven was as consistent (aside from the exorbitantly priced Wolf Gourmet Elite Countertop Oven with Convection). Similarly priced large toaster ovens concentrated heat in the center of the oven and had more significant fall-off of heat toward the edges.
It has among the best accessories of any model we’ve tested. The oven comes with two racks, a baking pan, and a broiling tray, and it’s the only model we’ve tested since 2013 to include a ceramic pizza stone (most competitors offer a flimsy metal pizza pan). The stone makes a crunchy golden-brown pizza crust and is also great for baking bread and pies.
Cuisinart also sells the oven’s accessories separately, should you need to replace them.
The oven cavity is roomy. It’s large enough to fit a 5.5-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven or a 6-quart Lodge Dutch oven (with aluminum foil in lieu of their lids)—just know that their weight causes the oven rack to bend slightly.
It can also fit a standard quarter-sheet tray (and if you put a quarter-sheet tray on each of its two racks, that’s equal to a standard half-sheet pan you’d use in a full-size oven). Additionally, most 12-cup muffin tins or 13-by-9-inch baking pans (without handles) fit inside the oven.
The Cuisinart toaster oven also has four slots for the racks, with metal hooks that pull out the middle rack when the door is opened.
It was one of the fastest models to preheat to 350 °F. It took just over three minutes.
It can automatically change temperatures midway through cooking. The Dual Cook setting allows you to program two cooking cycles back to back. For example, if you’re baking a pumpkin pie, you could use this setting to bake the pie at 425 °F for 15 minutes, then automatically reduce the temperature to 350 °F for the remaining 30 to 40 minutes. Our upgrade pick, the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, also has this feature, which Breville calls Phase Cook.
The Cuisinart toaster oven also has a “+30s” button that allows you to add 30 seconds to any cooking function—if you hold that button down you can also adjust the volume of the beeps or turn them off entirely.
Two convection speeds give you more control. Most toaster ovens have only one fan speed, but this Cuisinart model has two: high and low. For air frying, we’ve found that the high setting works better, since it cooks food a little faster.
However, if you plan to air fry often and you’re looking for an oven with a slightly more powerful fan that will cook even faster and get food a little crispier, we recommend our upgrade pick, the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro (or, check out our guide to the best air fryer toaster ovens for more options).
We appreciate the three-year limited warranty. Most competitors offer just one- or two-year warranties.
One caveat: If the oven becomes defective under warranty, Cuisinart won’t repair it—they’ll ask you to cut the cord and send them a picture of it, then send you an entirely new unit. They’ll even do this if the lightbulb burns out, which feels like a wasteful downside to this otherwise excellent warranty.
If something goes wrong with the oven after the warranty expires, Cuisinart will offer you 20% off the retail price of a new oven and provide free shipping.
This small, affordable oven is ideal for those who want something simple. It performed far better than the others we tested at this price level.
If our other picks have more features than you need, we recommend the inexpensive, no-frills Hamilton Beach 4 Slice Toaster Oven. It toasted bread faster and more evenly than any other oven we’ve tested that’s under $100, and its small footprint is ideal for kitchens with limited counter space.
It has a few quirks that are expected with cheaper models (such as running several degrees cooler than its set temperature), but on the whole those flaws are negligible.
The manual controls are easy to use. The knobs adjust the temperature (from 150 °F to broil/toast mode), the function (broil, toast, and bake), and the 30-minute timer. This oven lacks most of the features included in high-end models—such as preset cooking functions, a convection setting, and an internal light—but it excels at the basics, like making toast or frozen snacks.
It heats evenly. This toaster has only two heating elements, but since the oven cavity is so small, it still heats impressively well. It takes about 5 minutes for the oven to preheat.
Pricier models will alert you once the oven is preheated, but the Hamilton Beach does not—though it does have a charming ding when the timer is up.
Like most toaster ovens, the Hamilton Beach toaster oven will get hotter after each batch of toast you make in a row, so you need to manually reduce the toast shade setting for each subsequent batch to prevent burning.
This model comes with the most basic accessories: an oven rack, a baking pan, and a crumb tray.
It runs cooler than other models we tested. You need to increase the temperature by about 25 degrees when baking cookies or snacks. But this is a forgivable drawback considering the low price tag.
The biggest drawback is the toast shade setting on the timer dial. You have to turn the knob past the 10-minute mark and then reverse it to the desired shade setting. It can be difficult to determine where the dial should be placed for your preferred toast shade.
It lacks a strong spring mechanism to keep the oven door from falling open. This means you need to open it carefully to avoid putting unnecessary strain on the hinge.
The Hamilton Beach toaster oven comes with a one-year warranty. Contact Hamilton Beach for repairs or a replacement.
For the past three years, two Wirecutter employees have used the Hamilton Beach toaster oven for basic tasks like making toast, reheating pizza, and baking frozen snacks. They encountered no issues—this model is great for any simple toasting and baking jobs.
This convection toaster oven has a slightly more powerful fan for air frying than the Cuisinart model, plus convenient markings on the door and the easiest-to-clean interior. It also has additional settings for proofing bread, slow cooking, and dehydrating.
It’s significantly more expensive, but if you plan to air fry food often and want even more cooking functions than the Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven has (such as proof, air fry, reheat, cookies, slow cook, and dehydrate), consider getting the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro—our top pick in our guide to the best air fryer toaster ovens. It has a sleeker design, and its interface is easier to use.
It shares many features and accessories with the Cuisinart toaster oven. It has two fan speeds, but its highest fan speed is slightly more powerful than that of the Cuisinart model, so it crisps up food even faster. It also comes with two oven racks so you can cook more food at once, and the rack glides out when you open the door.
It comes with many of the same accessories as our pick from Cuisinart too, but we still prefer the Cuisinart toaster oven’s ceramic pizza stone over the Breville toaster oven’s nonstick pizza pan (though Breville does sell a pizza stone separately for around $30).
It’s bigger and easier to clean. The Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro can fit a 6-quart Lodge Dutch oven without a lid or a 5.5-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven with a lid (the same Le Creuset can only fit in the Cuisinart toaster oven without a lid). Its nonstick interior is also by far the easiest of our picks to wipe clean.
It has rack markings printed on the door. That means you never have to guess where to place the rack if you’re baking or roasting as opposed to broiling.
Supervising kitchen editor Marilyn Ong has been using the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro at home for about a year. It’s done a great job toasting bread and reheating leftovers. But since her wall oven doesn’t work well, she’s also relied on the Breville toaster oven for baking brownies and cookies, roasting veggies and whole chickens, and even braising stews. And, of course, its air fryer setting makes for perfect frozen french fries and chicken nuggets, which her kids appreciate. After a year of regular use, the oven is still in great shape.
Most air fryer recipes are written specifically for pod-shaped air fryers. If you want to prepare those recipes in a convection toaster oven, you can get good results with some minor adjustments.
There aren’t hard and fast rules, but as a general guideline, increase the cooking time of a convection toaster oven by several minutes and the temperature 25 to 50 degrees to compensate for its larger oven cavity.
For air fryer toaster ovens, you probably only need to increase the time by a couple minutes and the temperature by about 25 degrees (since their fans are more powerful than most standard convection toaster ovens).
If you want a slightly smaller convection toaster oven: The Breville Smart Oven has all the functionality of our larger main pick, the Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven, but a slightly smaller footprint. It’s still big enough to fit the Lodge 6-quart Dutch oven or the Le Creuset 5.5-quart Dutch oven (without their lids), but it comes with a single rack (whereas the Cuisinart toaster oven has two). The Smart Oven did well in our tests, toasting bread almost as evenly as our pick from Cuisinart. However, it’s slower to preheat, lacks an internal light, and its nonstick pizza pan isn’t as good a value as the Cuisinart toaster oven’s ceramic pizza stone. That said, we appreciated the intuitive interface, easy-to-read display, and ability to regulate heat well.
This is not a comprehensive list of everything we’ve ever tested, just what’s still available.
The Dash Mini Toaster Oven is cute as a button, but its small size is too limiting since you can’t even reheat a slice of pizza in it. Its internal temperature fluctuated wildly between 299 °F and 462 °F in our tests, which caused the cookies we baked to burn on top before they were fully baked.
The Mueller Premium Stainless Steel Toaster Oven also couldn’t maintain a consistent temperature—when set to 350 °F, the oven temperature slowly climbed to 455 °F before cascading back down. It didn’t toast evenly, either.
The Black+Decker 4-Slice Toaster Oven ran cooler than most other models we tested—when set to 350 °F, its actual temperature registered 290 °F when measured using an air probe. Toast was a little too dark on the underside, and the skin on the chicken thighs we baked was unappetizing and flabby.
The Black+Decker TO3250XSB Extra-Wide 8-Slice Toaster Oven had difficulty maintaining its internal temperature. It burned some things and undercooked others.
The Black+Decker TO1303SB 4-Slice Toaster Oven is cheaply built, gives you little control over the toast shade, and has a small interior space.
The Cuisinart Custom Classic Toaster Oven Broiler is easy to use, but on its medium setting, bread became too dark. Also, this model has no timer, so you have to keep a close watch on your food.
The Breville Mini Smart Oven baked cookies and Bagel Bites well, but it toasted bread inconsistently. It regulated its internal temperature surprisingly well, but it didn’t perform as well as the Panasonic FlashXpress Toaster Oven, one of our top picks.
We appreciated the compact size of the Breville Compact Smart Oven, but it didn’t do well in many of our tests.
The KitchenAid KCO211BM Digital Countertop Oven didn’t toast as evenly as our picks, and several slices of bread were burned in patches on the bottom. Some of the Bagel Bites we baked were also undercooked and pale.
The GE Quartz Convection Toaster Oven and the GE Calrod Convection Toaster Oven are identical, except that one has quartz heating elements and the other has Calrod heating elements, and we didn’t notice a huge difference in performance between the two. Aside from toasting unevenly, these models have wide gaps on either side of the oven racks that allow bread to slip through.
The Oster Large Digital Countertop Oven has cheap plastic components but costs more than our top pick. In our tests, its performance was inconsistent, and it had hot spots and high running temperatures.
The Cuisinart Deluxe Toaster Oven Broiler toasted bread unevenly, and its temperature control was less consistent.
The Calphalon Precision Air Fry Convection Oven didn’t toast as well as our picks and it didn’t evenly melt the cheese on Bagel Bites. It also had a very noisy convection fan that sounded like it was struggling to operate with every rotation.
Balmuda’s The Toaster is designed to steam bread while it toasts. In theory, this helps keep the “inner moisture and flavor from escaping,” but this wasn’t always true in our tests. We weighed white sandwich bread and rustic sourdough bread before and after toasting to see how much moisture the bread retained and on average, plain white sandwich bread actually retained less moisture when toasted in the Balmuda toaster oven than when toasted in our top pick, the Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven. The Balmuda toaster oven also has just three temperature settings—350 °F, 400 °F, and 450 °F—plus four presets, and it can only fit two pieces of bread.
The June Oven is a Wi-Fi–connected countertop model with an internal camera, a built-in probe thermometer (which estimates when your food will be cooked through), and several pre-programmed cooking functions. However, we were disappointed with this model’s performance, especially given its high price.
The De’Longhi Livenza Convection Toaster Oven did not toast evenly in our tests. It also had a difficult time maintaining its internal temperature (which fluctuated between 322 °F and 369 °F when set to 350 °F).
The Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer is very similar to our upgrade pick, the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, except it has fewer programmed settings (11 instead of the Pro’s 14) and a smaller oven capacity. If you need a slightly smaller machine, you’ll be happier with our pick from Cuisinart—it performed just as well and is more affordable.
The Breville Smart Oven Pro is nearly identical to the Breville Smart Oven. The Pro does add a couple of minor features, like a slow-cook mode and an internal light. But the Bagel Bites we toasted between the door and the front of the oven’s rack were noticeably paler than those toasted in the middle and back of the oven.
The exorbitantly priced Wolf Gourmet Elite Countertop Oven with Convection produced the most evenly browned toast of any model we tested. However, it took about 7 minutes to get those results, which is far slower than any of our picks, and the toast was dried out.
This article was edited by Marilyn Ong and Marguerite Preston.
Diy Brick Oven For our next update, we plan to test the Our Place Wonder Oven, a toaster oven with air frying capabilities and a steam component (similar to Balmuda’s The Toaster). It comes in an array of pleasing colors, but at about $200, it’s pricey for a small analog model—it measures just 11.6 by 10.6 by 11.5 inches, which is about the size of the much cheaper Panasonic FlashXpress Toaster Oven. But unlike the Panasonic toaster, it has convection cooking (aka air frying), so we’d like to see how it compares to our full-size air fryer toaster oven and convection toaster oven picks.