The Best Air-Fryer Toaster Ovens

Our favorite air-fryer toaster oven—the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro—excelled in all our cooking tests: air frying, roasting, baking, broiling, and toasting foods perfectly. It’s also one of the most user-friendly machines we’ve tested, with intuitive controls, an easy-to-read digital display, and a host of other features that make it a pleasure to operate.

We also loved the Ninja Foodi 10-in-1 XL Pro Air Fry Oven, which performs just as well as our favorite and is generally less expensive. Oddly, while it’s got a slightly bigger footprint than our favorite, its actual capacity is slightly smaller.

Finally, our Best Buy is the Instant Oven 18L Air Fryer Toaster Oven. It does a great job of air frying, roasting, and broiling, though it’s a little underpowered as a toaster. Its digital interface is not as easy to navigate as those of our top options, but considering that this model is less than half the price of our winner, we think that’s a fine tradeoff.

Want a simpler, less expensive option for air frying? Read our review of air fryers or watch our video comparing the two best types of air fryer options. 

What You Need to Know

What can’t the best air-fryer toaster ovens do? Serving as both air fryers and toaster ovens, these hybrid machines are more versatile than either of those appliances, allowing you to air-fry, toast, bake, roast, and broil different types of food. They’re also bigger than both air fryers and toaster ovens, providing plenty of room to air-fry mozzarella sticks for a crowd, roast a whole chicken, or even bake a 9-inch round cake. Because they’re bigger, you have to preheat them before many applications, unlike with conventional air fryers. But they still preheat more quickly than a standard oven, saving you time and helping you get a faster start on your meal. 

Like air fryers, air-fryer toaster ovens don’t actually fry your food. Instead, they’re essentially powerful countertop convection ovens, using fans to circulate hot air so that food cooks swiftly and evenly, its exterior crisping and browning while the interior remains tender and moist. (A mesh basket holds the food in the air-fryer toaster oven so that the air can circulate above and below.) And in contrast to smaller convection toaster ovens, air-fryer toaster ovens have fans that operate at higher speeds, allowing them to crisp and cook the surfaces of food more quickly when air frying, baking, or roasting.

Not all air-fryer toaster ovens are good at all tasks. In fact, only a few excel at everything from air frying to roasting. We’ve tested dozens of models over the years, and we’ve found that a few simple features make all the d... read more