Air fryers are a great option if you find yourself impatiently waiting for your oven to preheat or wish your oven-baked fries and chicken wings were a little crispier. These compact appliances don't require much more space than a microwave and work very well for crisping leftover pizza, preparing pre-packaged French fries or chicken nuggets, and making a quick side dish of crispy Brussels sprouts or cauliflower.
While air-fried food isn't the same as deep-fried food, airflow inside the cooking chamber helps with quick cooking and crisping. Plus, some air fryers are versatile enough to work like small ovens. Air fryers with a wide range of temperature settings and fan speeds can roast, bake, and dehydrate, which is great if you want to avoid heating your big oven on a hot day.
Air fryers come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Multi-cooker air fryers bring in more functions, like slow cooking. Dual-drawer models let you cook different foods on each side of the air fryer, so you can prepare your main dish and a side at once or keep vegetarian and meat-eater meals separate.
The best air fryers produce evenly well-cooked, crispy, and golden-brown food. They preheat and cook your food fast and offer a wide range of settings for different recipes and cooking methods.
While the capacity of the air fryers we've tested varies from 2 to 10 quarts, bigger is better when it comes to performance. Unlike in a deep fryer, you won't get the best results by filling the basket with ingredients — instead, you'll want to arrange your food in a single layer as much as possible. You may want a bigger air fryer, even if you only cook for a few people. Baskets that are square instead of round and shallow instead of deep also offer a bigger cooking surface area.
We've tested 20 air fryers, and you'll find our recommendations for the best ones below. For more options, you can also check out the best large-capacity air fryers and the best small air fryers. Once you've found the right model for your crispy foods, you might want the best microwave for your popcorn or reheating needs or the best blender for your morning smoothies and homemade soups.
The best air fryer we've tested is the Ninja Foodi DZ550. With a 10-quart capacity, it's a family-sized air fryer, but its bigger cooking surface area is useful even when you're just cooking for yourself. It makes great-quality air-fried food, producing evenly crispy, golden-brown air-fried foods like chicken wings, vegetables, or French fries, partly because you have plenty of room to arrange food in a single layer.
Its dual-basket design lets you cook different foods using different settings in each basket. It has various modes for different cooking methods and a pretty wide range of fan speeds to suit purposes like dehydrating or baking. Like many other Ninja air fryers, its crisper trays have a ceramic non-stick coating. That's a pro if you avoid conventional non-stick materials, but makes it more difficult to clean by hand.
This model has a temperature probe that you can use to automatically monitor the internal temperature of meat like steak or a whole chicken. This feature adds to its price, and if you don't need it and want a cheaper option, the Ninja Foodi FlexBasket has a similar overall performance. It has one big 10-qt basket that you can divide for separate dishes or use as one big basket when cooking bigger quantities. The large basket is a bit awkward to handle, but it produces very good-quality fried food.
Bigger is better for performance, but you might want something smaller if bigger won't fit in your kitchen. The COSORI TurboBlaze is a 6-qt air fryer, a size generally recommended for serving about four people. Still, its square basket gives you more room to arrange food in a single layer compared with some other options with the same capacity. It doesn't perform quite as well as the Ninja, but comes close, producing very good-quality air-fried food.
It's also notably versatile. It has five different fan speeds, so you can use the 'Bake' setting for a medium fan speed to avoid drying out cake or cookies, or 'Dehydrate' for a very low fan speed to prevent light ingredients from blowing around. It's one of the few air fryers that tells you what fan speed corresponds with each setting, making it a good option if you plan to experiment with a variety of recipes in your air fryer.
However, it doesn't have the best temperature stability. While it does an okay job of maintaining a stable temperature, the Ninja is much better in this regard, which can help with accurately following recipes or cooking delicate foods that need specific conditions. While it cooks food quickly, preheating takes a while. That said, it has a preheat mode, so you don't have to guess when the air fryer is fully heated.
The Ninja Pro AF141 is the best small air fryer we've tested. This air fryer's basket has more surface area for cooking than other 5-quart models we've tested, so despite its compact design, you have a good amount of room to spread out your ingredients. It doesn't air fry quite as evenly as the previous picks, so you risk having a bigger proportion of food over or undercooked by the time your food is ready. Still, it produces good results.
It also preheats and cooks very quickly, so it's ideal for preparing a quick snack. It returns to temperature very soon after you add food and maintains a particularly stable temperature during cooking. While it's not as versatile as the COSORI TurboBlaze, with a smaller range of fan speed and temperature settings and fewer modes, it has four modes, including air fry, roast, reheat, and dehydrate functions. Like our top pick, its crisper tray has a ceramic non-stick coating instead of the more common PTFE.
If you want an air fryer with a window so you can watch your food cook, the best option we've tested is the Dreo ChefMaker. This high-end air fryer has a 6-qt capacity, so it's a lot smaller than the similarly priced Ninja Foodi DZ550, but it has a window and a light inside its cooking chamber so you can see inside. While it cooks less evenly than the Ninja, it's fast and makes good-quality fried food.
It has a small fan speed range with a relatively slow maximum fan speed. Still, it has a temperature range wide enough for a variety of recipes. This model also has some unique features, including 'Chef Mode' presets, which use a temperature probe and a water misting feature to automatically cook cuts of meat like steak. It connects with an app that lets you monitor the cooking process, look up 'Chef Mode' instructions for a variety of foods, and send information to the machine, so all you have to do is press start.
It's also priced at the high end for an air fryer. If you want to save money and don't mind somewhat worse performance, the Cuisinart AIR-200 is our next-best option with a window. It makes less evenly air-fried food compared to the other picks listed here, but it still produces decent results, and it's significantly cheaper than the Dreo while still letting you keep an eye on your dinner.
While most air fryers are only available in black and stainless steel variations, the Beautiful 6qt Digital comes in various pastel colors with gold accents. It doesn't perform quite as well as the Ninja Foodi DZ550 and isn't as versatile as the COSORI TurboBlaze, but it still produces good-quality air-fried food, so it's a good option if you want an air fryer that matches your kitchen.
See our reviewOur recommendations above are what we think are currently the top air fryers for most people. We factor in the price, feedback from our visitors, and availability.
If you'd like to do the work of choosing yourself, here's a list of all air fryer reviews. Be careful not to get too caught up in the details. While no air fryer is perfect, most are good enough to please almost everyone, and the differences are often not noticeable unless you look for them.