8 best air fryers for easy home-cooking — and the top pick isn’t Ninja

When it came to choosing the best air fryer overall, it had to produce delicious foods in the easiest way possible. The Kalorik vivid 7-quart air fryer delivered on both fronts.

Unlike the other air fryers I tried, Kalorik’s model has a colored touchscreen to navigate the cooking presets (of which there are more than 200, broken down into 12 different categories, including red meat, frozen faves, veggies, fish, chicken, bake, and vegan). In one test, I selected seafood followed by crab cakes, and the air fryer automatically set a temperature and time depending on the number of crab cakes I was cooking.

You can manually set the temperature and time using DIY mode, but it is easier to use the pre-set cook settings, which are very accurate. I tested this with a variety of meats, including steak, pork, and chicken, and even tofu, and the results were impressive.

In fact, the Kalorik vivid 7-quart air fryer is equipped with lots of settings to make the cooking process easier, from a defrost option (which is not common) to a notification to remind you to turn halfway through the cooking time.

If all that wasn’t enough, it’s $100, which feels like a steal for a high-tech air fryer that produces fantastic food.

The Cosori lite 2.1-quart air fryer is perfect if you want something affordable and compact. The first thing I noted was how quiet it runs and how easy it is to store away.

The size and price mean it comes with the fewest cooking presets of any air fryer on this list — the four options include air fry, roast, bake, and reheat, and you must manually set the temperature and timer.

The basket is small, so even though I could fit two drumsticks or a handful of fish bites with ease, I couldn’t pack vegetables — such as a large sweet potato cut into fries — without remembering to shake the basket halfway through the cooking process. I found that the vegetables wouldn’t cook evenly if I didn’t do this. That said, for just $60, the Cosori lite 2.1 quart air fryer is easily the best budget air fryer.

The Gourmia 7-quart fry ‘n fold digital air fryer features a glass basket that fits onto a base. When not in use, the top part of the air fryer can be turned upside down and slotted into the glass basket, which halves the unit’s size, making it easy to store.

The 10 cooking presets include typical settings you expect, such as air fry, bake, roast, dehydrate, reheat, and keep warm, as well as more unique presets, including bacon, wings, and fries. The setting for wings was most impressive and resulted in crisp, evenly air-fried wings to perfection down to the exact minute. The preheat and turn reminder notifications were especially helpful, and after testing lots of different air fryers, I’m surprised that this feature isn’t on every one.

I was, however, disappointed to see a reflective plastic, mirror-like piece on the bottom of the glass basket with glue coming out of the edges. That aside, this is an excellent choice.

I’ve been using the Ninja foodi six-in-one 10-quart two-basket air fryer for years, and while I love that I can cook meat on one side and vegetables in the other, I always found the design a bit bulky. That’s why I was excited to test the Ninja doublestack air fryer.

The vertical design is a game-changer, giving you more space on your countertop. Each basket has a capacity of 4-quart, making it perfectly sized for multiple large pieces of meat and enough vegetables for the whole family.

Beyond having two baskets, it also has two stacked meal racks, so you can cook four different dishes simultaneously. From testing, foods placed on top of the meal racks seemed to cook faster. It took some trial and error to find the best cooking spots and which cook times and temperatures worked best, so all four foods cooked evenly. While the meal racks are great, they’re not the easiest to remove from the baskets when they’re hot — oven mitts are necessary.

For an air fryer with such a high price tag, I was surprised that it has only six cooking presets — air fry, broil, reheat, roast, bake, and dehydrate. It does, however, have match cook and smart finish settings: match cook copies the temperature and time settings from the top to the bottom basket. Smart finish lets you choose different cooking settings with different times, but ensures the two baskets finish at the same time.

Bella is a brand that prides itself on creating easily storable and aesthetic kitchen appliances, and you’ll find that to be the case with its 4-quart trizone air fryer.

It has two baskets (both with a 2-quart capacity) with a removable divider, so you can cook two dishes separately or remove the divider and use the large 4-quart space, which makes it a very versatile machine.

When cooking in dual mode, you can use different cook settings (roasting, air frying, baking) and temperatures for each basket and then sync them up so that food finishes at the same time. When the middle barrier is removed, and you cook in the 4-quart space, the dish cooks faster than when cooking with two separate baskets.

I was impressed by how well this air fryer cooked different meats, perhaps more so than vegetables, which seemed slightly overcooked in comparison.

Glass air fryers are becoming increasingly popular — and after testing countless, the Fritaire self-cleaning air fryer is the best option to buy in this category. Rather than a ceramic or aluminium base, the Fritaire cooks food in a glass bowl, resulting in a Teflon-, PFAS-, and BPA-free cooking experience.

The top of the air fryer uses up to 400F hot convection technology for the six cooking presets — steak, chicken, seafood, french fries, baked dishes, and de-hydrate. There is quite a lot of setup required for this air fryer, due to the accessories — an air fryer stand, rotisserie spit and rotisserie motor, and tumbling basket — needed for cooking. The rotisserie spit and motor were the most confusing to set up — but once I figured it out, I was able to evenly cook chicken legs to perfection. And with the tumbling basket, I made delicious sweet potato fries and crispy catfish bites.

The Fritaire is the only air fryer I’ve included within this guide that has a self-cleaning feature. While this sounds like a nifty feature, in practice, it didn’t work as well as I hoped. Essentially, I filled the glass bowl with water and soap. The air fryer uses a hot air stream circulator to heat and move the water to break down tough stains. Unfortunately, I still had to clean the glass bowl and the accessories by hand. In fact, hand-cleaning the tumbler basket was not easy at all. Not only that, but you have to dry it immediately so it won’t rust.

Our Place’s wonder oven may have a stylish retro look, but this isn’t your grandma’s toaster oven. With six cooking functions (air fry, bake, roast, toast, reheat, and broil), I was able to roast or air fry larger items (including a fair-sized turkey leg) and watch it cook through the front glass panel with the interior light.

Most air fryers have a max temperature setting of 400F, but the wonder oven can cook up to 450F. Like a regular oven, you must preheat it before using it, but the preheat time is not built into the presets (likely because the air fryer features dials rather than digital buttons). Setting the time was a little difficult — I could easily set the dial to 10, 20, or 30 minutes as these numbers were printed, but finding 14 or 42 minutes was not as easy because numbers are indicated by tick marks.

The cooking presets don’t come with predetermined times either, so I often guessed how long to cook something. For instance, I air-fried chicken legs and squash on 400F for 12 minutes, but then had to cook them for another 15 minutes because the chicken legs weren’t cooked. Baking was a little easier to do and seemed to result in shorter cook times than if I were to use the oven.

That said, the steam infusion technology is a game-changer, resulting in crispy exteriors and fluffy interiors, especially when reheating leftovers or when toasting bread.

Wifi connectivity and app controls are slowly being incorporated into air fryers, and the Dreo chefmaker combi fryer is a clear example of this — it takes the title of best smart air fryer in this guide.

Not only can you control the air fryer through the Dreo app, but you can also cook with online recipes, monitor the cooking process, and receive notifications when your food is complete. If that didn’t sound good enough, it features 48 preset programs broken down into three modes (classic mode, chef mode, and probe cook).

Classic mode allows you to set the time and temperature for basic air frying presets (including reheating, air frying, and roasting), while probe mode utilizes a thermometer to measure the internal temperature of meat and alerts you when cooking is complete. Chef mode automates the cooking process by using a cook probe that’s inserted into meat to sense temperature and moisture. It also automatically adjusts the time, water atomization, and heat convection for the perfect meal. Unlike the other settings, chef mode cooks virtually silently — I almost had to double-check that it was working. I had the most delicious salmon thanks to chef mode, which I could watch cook via the see-through basket and the interior light.

With all of this tech, be prepared to shell out a decent amount of cash for this air fryer.