The best air fryer ovens: our top recommendations

If you’re in the UK, you can buy this appliance under the Sage brand name. In the US, it’s Breville.

The smart oven air fryer is a microwave-sized countertop air fryer oven with ten separate cooking functions: toast (6 slices), crumpet, grill, bake, roast, warm, pizza, air fry, reheat and slow cook. The model we tested is in a bright, brushed stainless-steel silver, although there are other colour options: there’s a choice of eleven in the US. It’s high quality and beautifully made and will be an asset to your worktop – most rivals are much less attractive.

It has an LCD display and button and dial controls. Inside the oven are three shelf heights and it comes with a set of high quality accessories: a 30cm/12in pizza pan, a wire shelf, a grilling rack, a roasting pan, an air-frying basket, and crumb tray.

But it’s when cooking that this appliance really shines, producing crispy and flavourful food. This may be down to the ElementIQ system, which uses a smart algorithm and sensors to control the temperature perfectly and evenly.

This is a luxury buy, with a high quality build and performance. But if your budget can stretch to it, I think it’s well worth it. If not, we have some more wallet-friendly options below.

The Breville Halo Air Fryer Rotisserie Oven comes with a mesh drum, for cooking food such as chips, as well as a rotisserie spit. Its 10-litre capacity is large enough to cook a joint of meat, but not so overwhelming that it seems wasteful to cook small volumes of food.

It’s versatile as well: it can do everything that a traditional air fryer can, and then some. The rotisserie spit is good for a whole, 1.3kg chicken and the drum can hold 750g of chips.

It has touchscreen controls, and you can opt for one of the pre-set cooking programmes (chips, chicken, vegetables, and steak) or one of the manual options (air fry, bake and dehydrate).

If you want a good value, budget model that won’t overwhelm your countertop, this is it.

This air fryer oven is one of the largest we’ve tested, with a whopping 26QT/24-litre capacity. It’s also one of the rare air fryers made from stainless steel (along with other food-grade metals), which means it looks a lot better and brighter on your kitchen counter than many of its rivals. But you’ll need plenty of room to house it.

This HySapientia model is cheaper to run than you may think, especially if you’re cooking for a larger group. You can cook an entire family meal in it, and it’ll cost much less than in a traditional oven. It produces very crispy food as well – perhaps because there’s plenty of room for hot air to circulate. It comes with plenty of accessories, including a rotisserie spit – making it a versatile option.

However, its huge size means you’re heating up much more space than you need to if you just want to cook a couple of fish fingers for the kids. And we didn’t love its control panel. It’s largely dial-operated, where a touchscreen would be preferable, and makes a lot of annoying beeps as you choose your settings.

Altogether though, this model strikes a good balance between looks and price.

If aesthetic appeal are important, the Smeg Multifunctional Oven is the appliance to go for. But you’ll need deep pockets as it’s twice the price of any of our other recommendations. You’ll also need plenty of counter space: when the door is open, it’s large enough to overhang a standard kitchen countertop.

But it has a huge 30-litre capacity and a menu of preset programmes, allowing you to do everything from proofing dough and baking, to roasting potatoes and steaming vegetables. There’s a tank in the top so you can add water for steaming. We loved its versatility and thought its cooking results were good.

We were less enamoured with its multifunctional controls – you’ll need to keep the instructions handy until you learn to programme it. And its interior and cooking accessories are time-consuming to clean. They’re not dishwasher-safe either.

It’s a little bit more work, and a lot more money than some of our other recommendations, but it is a countertop beauty.

The Tefal Easy Fry air fryer oven is faster and cheaper to cook in than a conventional oven and has a huge, 20-litre capacity. It’s versatile as well, with ten cooking functions and seven preset programmes, including bake, grill, toast, roast and pizza, as well as two manual modes for toasting bagels and reheating, plus an automatic keep warm setting.

It comes with all the accessories you’ll need, including wire racks, an air fryer basket, a crumb tray and food tray. These aren’t dishwasher-safe, however, so you’ll need to clean them regularly by hand to prevent cooking residue build-up.

The oven itself isn’t quite as easy to clean as a standard air fryer, and it doesn’t have a shake/turn function midway through the cooking programme. You’ll also need plenty of counter space to house it. But if you’re a big or busy household, it’ll give you more options and a simpler way to cook.

This Cosori air fryer oven has a 13QT/12L capacity and comes with a range of accessories to help you make the most of its 11 functions: a drip tray, a baking tray, two air fryer trays, a rotisserie basket, and a rotisserie spit with spiked fork and a handle. All accessories have a non-stick coating and, aside from the drip tray, are dishwasher safe.

It’s controlled via a touchscreen panel, from which you can choose one of the cooking functions (air fry, roast, broil, bake, pizza, toast, reheat, warm, dry, proof and rotisserie) and adjust time and temperature. The air fryer oven has a cooking range of from 30°C/90°F (for proofing dough and yoghurt-making) to 220°C/430°F (air frying and roasting). Different cooking modes will also use a low or high fan speed and each one has a time range. The toast setting has the option to choose darkness level as well as a flip reminder.

During testing, we were impressed with its speed and the quality of its cooking but the tradeoff for its budget-friendly price is that it’s a little noisy and rattly in operation.

The VonShef isn’t the most intuitive air fryer oven to use or the easiest to clean among the models we’ve tested but it has a lot of plus points – especially for its very reasonable price.

For a start, it’s incredibly capacious at 28 litres: you can fit in a 12-inch pizza and up to 1kg of chips. Second, it’s versatile. It has a 40-230°C temperature range and a host of cooking accessories, including a rotisserie spit.

But its presets and instruction booklet aren’t perfectly reliable, so you’ll need to experiment with it for the best results.