Best Air Fryers of 2026

Six and a half quarts, 450 °F, 1,750 watts and six cooking functions: on paper the Ninja AF181 gives up almost nothing to our top pick, and it does it while holding half a quart more and weighing nearly two pounds less. Max Crisp is the mode to care about — Ninja runs the element flat out so frozen food goes from freezer to crisp without a thaw, and the basket is rated for 5 pounds of fries or 9 pounds of wings.

That combination makes it the value pick, and for a lot of kitchens it's simply the right one. If most of what you cook comes out of a freezer bag, or is a chicken breast and a pile of vegetables, the AF181 does the job for less money than the Cosori and asks less of the counter. What it doesn't have is the Cosori's adjustable fan and its ceramic basket, and the fan noise is the trade you feel every time you use it.

Loud is the honest word. It's noisy enough that a phone call in the same room gets awkward, and the machine announces the start and end of every cook with a run of high beeps you'll hear from the next room. None of that touches the food. But if the air fryer lives in an open kitchen rather than a closed-off one, that's the reason to spend more on the quieter Cosori, because you'll hear this one every single night.

Two drawers, two fans, two heaters, one dinner. The Ninja DualZone exists for the specific problem of a protein and a side that want different temperatures and should hit the plate at the same moment, and Smart Finish staggers the timers so they do. We found the point isn't speed. It's that nothing sits under foil going soft while the second batch cooks.

Each zone is a proper 4 quarts — a family portion of fries, a meal's worth of wings — with its own basket and crisper plate, both dishwasher safe. Match Cook copies one setting to both drawers when you're cooking the same thing twice, which happens more often than it sounds, and six functions cover air fry, broil, roast, bake, reheat and dehydrate.

In exchange you get the one thing a single basket genuinely can't do: two foods, two temperatures, one finish time. Start checking a few minutes before the preset says — the times run hot, and a half-full drawer gets there sooner than a full one. That habit is the difference between crisp wings and jerky.

Fifteen and three-quarter inches of depth is where nine quarts actually lives. The Chefman TurboFry is a long machine — 11.81 inches wide, 11.42 tall — so on a two-foot counter it occupies most of the front-to-back space and leaves little room for a cutting board behind it. Measure that depth before anything else, because it's the one thing about this fryer you can't work around.

What the depth buys you is the largest basket in this group, and by capacity the best value of the lot. Chefman rates it for up to seven people, and a full bag of frozen fries goes in as one layer instead of two. The 450 °F ceiling handles a fast char; the 90 °F floor handles dehydrating and proofing. The window means you can watch a batch brown without pulling the drawer and dumping the heat into the room.

Seven functions, a shake reminder, and a keep-warm setting that's more useful than it sounds when a second batch is waiting its turn. It weighs 11.3 pounds, lighter than either of the 6-quart machines here, so shifting it to clean underneath isn't the chore the volume suggests.

Who it's for is easy: a big household, a chest freezer, a Sunday of meal prep. It handles the basics — fries, wings, reheating — as well as anything here, and it does it in quantities nothing else on this page will match. The trade is a deep, plain, black plastic machine. If you cook for two, a 6-quart basket is easier to live with and just as quick on a single batch.

At 8.22 inches wide, the bella Slim fits gaps nothing else here will: between the refrigerator and the wall, on the end of a short counter, on a shelf in a rental. It's narrow by design rather than shrunk — 14.56 inches deep, 11.14 tall — so it still behaves like a proper air fryer from the front, and it doesn't look like a piece of lab equipment while it does it.

Narrow doesn't mean toy. The 4-quart basket holds up to 3.3 pounds of food, which is a real dinner for two rather than a single serving, and the ceramic coating — no PFAS, PFOA, PTFE, lead or cadmium — is the same idea as the top pick's in a machine that costs far less. We rate it the easiest of the group to live with on a small counter, and at 7.3 pounds it's the lightest machine here: one hand to move, no wrestling.

The fan is the detail that stuck with us. For 1,300 watts it moves a surprising amount of air — enough that a light parchment liner lifts and flutters unless there's food weighing it down. That's great news for crisping and mildly annoying if you like liners, and it's the sort of thing you only learn by using the machine for a week.

The least expensive way past six quarts in this group comes with a window, which tells you where the savings went: not into the glass or the basket, but into the plastic body and the basic touch pad. OLIXIS gives you 6.34 quarts, 12 functions and a see-through drawer, and it's the machine we hand to someone buying their first air fryer and not sure they'll use it.

In use it's more competent than the price suggests. 1,700 watts and a square basket crisp frozen food properly, and the window is the feature you end up using every time — checking a batch without pulling the drawer and losing the heat, which is the whole reason a window is worth having. Six quarts is the claim; in practice it's a comfortable basket for two and a stretch for four.

So: the budget pick, and a good one. It's the machine for a first air fryer, a dorm room, a cabin, or a second basket for the deck — places where a premium machine would be wasted. It cooks frozen food properly, the window makes the whole thing feel less like a gamble, and if it turns out you don't use an air fryer much, you haven't sunk much into finding out.

Four quarts is a real limit, and the Chefman makes it obvious from the first batch: two chicken breasts and a handful of sprouts fill the basket, and a family-sized pile of fries needs two rounds. Within that limit it's a well-sorted little machine, and it's honest about what it is rather than pretending four quarts is a family size.

Four functions — air fry, bake, reheat, roast — with presets on the touch panel, plus a shake alarm at the halfway mark that turns out to be the feature we used most. The Hi-Fry mode is the detail worth knowing: for the last couple of minutes it pushes the heat up for a finishing crunch, and on frozen food that's the difference between crisp and merely hot.

The rest of it is small-things-done-right. The basket slides on a track instead of scraping, the basket and rack are both dishwasher safe, and 7.5 pounds is light enough to put away in a cupboard between uses. You're giving up capacity and a viewing window; what you aren't giving up is even cooking.

A window with a light inside the basket sounds like a gimmick until you've used one. On the Cuisinart you can watch a batch of wings go from pale to done without pulling the drawer and losing the heat, and the light is the difference between seeing the food and seeing a reflection of your own kitchen.

The capacity claims are the most useful in this group because Cuisinart actually spells them out: 2 pounds of wings, three chicken cutlets, a 3.5-pound chicken, or 6 cups of vegetables in a 4.5-quart basket. That's dinner for two or three rather than batch cooking, and the listing doesn't oversell it the way most of these do.

Four functions — air fry, roast, bake, keep warm — plus four air-fry presets for fries, wings, frozen snacks and vegetables, and a toss reminder that tells you when to flip. The parts are dishwasher safe, and the stainless-and-black body is the best-looking thing in this group by a margin, which matters for something that stays on the counter.

Where it lands is the cook who works by eye and wants to watch. It handles the everyday jobs without fuss and looks good doing them, and at 8 pounds it's easy to move when the counter needs clearing. If you need to feed four or cook from frozen in volume, spend the capacity elsewhere; if you cook two portions and like to see what's happening, this is a nicer machine to own than its spec sheet suggests.