The Best Air Fryers for Tater Tot Parties and Lonely Batches of Fish Sticks

We put top-ranked air fryers to the test to find out the best one (and also whether or not one of these gadgets is really worth owning at all).
Photo of the best air fryer in our product test The Philips Air Fryer. Alongside is a plate of airfryed chicken cutlet...
Photo by Chelsea Kyle, Food Styling by Simon Andrews


Before we get into our hunt for the best air fryer, we want put these two ideas out there right at the top: Air fryers can really work, not so much to fry food, but to “fry food”—to crisp it up and give the illusion of deep-frying. Also, the air fryer, more than anything, is a work of marketing genius. The burgeoning field of products on the market now under that moniker is actually similar to another small kitchen appliance, the convection oven, which uses a fan to circulate hot air within the chamber, cooking food faster and more evenly. Air fryers, too, blow air rapidly across the surface of food as it cooks, wicking away moisture to render the surface crisp—in the manner of a deep fryer, but without the fat. That’s the idea, anyway.

Most air fryers have a similar design and resemble little countertop robot-penguins: The top half of the penguin contains the heating element, fan, and control panel, and the bottom half has a removable drawer where you stick your tater tots or chicken wings. The machines run at the time and temperature the user specifies and then automatically shut off. This is generally not a set-it-and-forget-it situation, though; for many dishes, user’s manuals request that you shake the basket halfway through cooking, so food within gets exposed more evenly to the hot air.

That air fryers can’t quite achieve the immaculate perfection of traditional fat-fried foods doesn’t mean they can’t approximate it, and cooks who have experimented with the devices have also found novel uses beyond french fries and chicken tenders—for instance, high-moisture veggies like zucchini, okra, and eggplant. We tried a number machines marketed as air fryers and one wild card: a Cuisinart convection toaster oven. As traditional boxy convection ovens, the Cuisinart and other products like it don’t pretend to be something they’re not, though they now boast of their air-frying capabilities as well (the version we tried from the makers of Instant Pot actually tries to square this circle in typical Instant fashion by boasting many, many uses in its title). We thought it could be advantageous to have a toaster oven and air fryer (and whatever else) in one device, thus saving some counter space.

The loser in all this product testing? Our electricity bills! Read on for the winners. For more about the testing process in our search for the best air fryers, scroll to the bottom of the page.

Table of contents

The best air fryer overall
The best budget air fryer
The most versatile air fryer
How we tested
Factors we evaluated
Other air fryers we tested
The takeaway

The best air fryer overall: Philips Premium Digital Air Fryer

Sometimes when you spend more, you get more. The latest model of our original winner in 2019 from Philips is four times more expensive than some competitors. And when tested with smaller amounts of food, it performed more or less the same as one or two much cheaper options. But it distinguished itself with panache when filled it up with fries: Whereas most others turned out batches that were burned in spots and undercooked in others (the Instant Omni being an exception), the Philips cooked a pound and a half of fries with uncanny consistency. They were crunchy. They were evenly browned, crisp on the outside, and soft in the middle. Just for fun and because we had one around, we also tried to reheat a two-year-old’s three-day-old chicken tender, which had gotten pretty floppy and unappetizing. It came out as crispy as it did out of the kitchen at the Cheesecake Factory (no apologies). 

The Philips also has both an easy and attractive interface, centered around a super-intuitive dial controlling the time and temperature. It’s not just even-cooking and easy to use—it’s also efficient. And though it works best preheated, it get hot incredibly quickly (five minutes or less to get to 350℉) and has a distinctive chime to let you know the food is ready. Finally, the included instruction manual has cooking times for a number of common air fryer applications (including our zucchini, tots, and fries), and we found it to be spot-on accurate.

Philips Premium Digital Airfryer

The best budget air fryer: Ninja AF101 Air Fryer

It’s little wonder that the Ninja AF101, with its modest 4L capacity and straightforward design, is so ubiquitous a sight on #airfryerTikTok. The machine delivers admirably on its promise of crispy fare, rendering tater tots shatteringly and evenly crunchy. Sweet potato fries earned an admirably crusty exterior. Zucchini got some nice color, although its texture could never be described as “crispy”—it looked and tasted as though it’d been simply sautéed on a stovetop. (One wonders why anyone would drag out the air fryer for such a pedestrian result.) 

Air-frying for a crowd, however, might prove tricky with the Ninja AF101. The accompanying Quick Start Guide recommends, for example, frying only a pound of tater tots or sweet potato fries at a time. That’s a half pound less than Philips’s demonstrated capacity, and indeed, overloading the Ninja AF101 yielded significantly less crispy results. But at only $100—less than half the price of our recommended Philips offering—the Ninja AF101 has our attention.

Ninja AF101 Air Fryer 4 Quart

The most versatile air fryer: Instant Omni Pro 18L Toaster Oven and Air Fryer

Of all the machines we tested for the 2021 update, the Instant Omni Pro 18L Toaster Oven and Air Fryer produced, hands down, the crispiest, most evenly baked results. It was also the most gigantic, weighing in at 26 pounds, and, like the Phillips required a preheat. And heat it does: Ingredients go inside a metal mesh tray, which can get precariously hot. We walked away with a not-so-fun souvenir—a smarting first-degree burn—after accidentally bumping a forearm. It’s hard to imagine this happening with any of the more traditional-presenting air fryers, none of which require so much as a pot holder to safely remove their baskets. 

On the plus side, the Instant Omni Pro claims to do much more than mere air-frying, which, considering the hefty price tag, it had better. It’s also a toaster oven! Rotisserie oven! Dehydrator! Broiler! Roaster! Warmer! Don’t expect magic, though: Attempts to use the rotisserie function were...unsuccessful. Even slightly-less-than-perfectly-trussed chicken resulted in a drooping wing that easily hindered the machine’s rotation mechanism, preventing it from spinning. That said, cooking a chicken on the supplied sheet pan with the Roast setting made for an appealingly moist bird. So if you’re looking for an extra oven to do oven stuff and you’re really into air-frying, this is a fine machine for you.

Instant Omni Pro 14-in-1 in Black and Stainless Steel

How we tested

In the search for the best air fryers, we made tater tots and zucchini, starting with smaller amounts of food in each of six air fryers: about two servings of frozen tater tots and then a mixture of zucchini and summer squash, sliced into coins, splashed with olive oil, and sprinkled with salt. (Manufacturers don’t advertise a completely fat-free experience, advising cooks to toss most food in a small amount of oil prior to cooking.) For top performing fryers, we tried 24-ounce batches of hand-cut fries, tossing each portion in a half tablespoon of olive oil and sprinkling it with salt. Because each machine is designed a little differently, we relied on the manufacturer’s instructions in terms of time, temperature, etc., for each preparation—though the specs ended up being pretty similar across all machines.

Factors we evaluated

Is the food crispy? Is it like fried food?

This is the paramount concern. No further explanation needed, except to say that we focused on foods that tested the machine’s ability to perform as an alternative kind of fryer—not as something that could, for instance, also bake cream puffs, which are featured in a recipe book accompanying one of these devices. You can just use your oven for that!

Does it cook food evenly?

With the stipulation that the user is expected to shake the frying basket once or twice during cooking, does the design of the machine maximize the movement of air over all the food in the basket? Does it end up evenly brown and crunchy, or does it cook unevenly—too brown in parts and raw in others? This criteria, of course, necessarily favors machines designed for max air exposure: the Instant and the Cuisinart.

Is it easy to program?

With a couple notable exceptions—the Philips’s dial and the Instant’s touchscreen, for instance—most of these air fryers are programmed via buttons. Simply speaking, was it easy to do? We ignored the machines’ preset functions for popular air fryer options like fries and chicken.

Is it easy to clean?

This is almost a nonissue because the design of so many air fryers is so similar that they’re all about the same to clean—except for one. See below. All our recommended air fryers include dishwasher-safe baskets and racks.

Is it a good deal?

This seems worth considering, but frankly, only you can look into your heart and decide the monetary value of regular access to crispy, low-fat, home-cooked fries.

Other air fryers we tested

In tests of smaller amounts of food, the Gowise USA Programmable 7-in-1 Air Fryer performed really well, and it’s definitely an affordable alternative if you’re dying for an air fryer but also need to pay your utility bills. (And if you don’t have a lot of food to cook. It’s great for single people making small lonely batches of fish fingers!) It has a basket that’s exceptionally easy to clean, is quieter than almost anything else out there, and is also very intuitive to use. And the 3.7-quart 7-in-1 model is in the $60–$70 range most places. (Gowise has also added an 8-in-1 machine for just a few more bucks. All of the above, plus it’ll mow your lawn!). It remains a solid budget choice.

The Cosori Premium performed a lot like the Gowise, though the latter was a little easier to use (and about half the cost). 

The NuWave Brio Digital had a confusing interface and a wire basket that was annoying to clean. (The others have nonstick-coated molded metal baskets with holes or slats cut into them.) 

The Farberware 3.2 Quart Air Fryer had a timer that ticked loudly and—more important—the food it turned out was the worst of the lot. The air-fried zucchini, for instance, was practically jelly, cooked to death with scarcely a hint of browning on the outside.

The Cuisinart TOA-60 Air Fryer Toaster Oven is a convection toaster oven with an air fryer setting. It doesn’t make claims about use as versatile as the Instant Omni, but still offers the benefit that, if you’re familiar with how a toaster oven works, you don’t have to learn anything new. The larger benefit of the Cuisinart is that this thing is fantastic at air-frying, or, as old-timers might call it, convection cooking. In fact it calls the whole “air fryer” enterprise into question. If the purpose is to circulate air over the surface of the food, why jam the food in these small-ass baskets rather than spread it out on a sheet to maximize exposure? That’s what the Cuisinart does, and it performed terrifically with most everything: tater tots, sliced zucchini, and sweet potato fries. Everything came out crunchy and golden; the food got a little darker around the edges than with some other air fryers, but not in a particularly troubling way. However, because it’s a whole different machine, it’s enormous relative to everything tested but the Instant and won't fit on many a countertop. If we’re imagining that this machine will do double duty as a toaster it seems less than practical to haul it out of the cupboard for every piece of toast. And then there’s the matter of that toast: according to a previous Epicurious product review—which tested the Cuisinart as a toaster oven, not as an air fryer—it is very much not the best toaster. In fact, it failed at doing almost everything that was not air frying, possibly for the same reasons it’s so good as an air fryer, which is that hot hot heat. It’s like the good book said: What will it profit a man if he gains a killer air fryer but forfeits the ability to make toast?

The Dash Tasti Crisp Electric Air Fryer + Oven Cooker, another frequent guest star on #airfryerTikTok, is a steal at $60. Alas, it proved too good to be true, yielding greasy results that at best recalled mediocre dive bar fare. 

The Ninja Foodi 6-in-1 8 Quart 2-Basket Air Fryer was intriguing: It’s essentially two Ninja AF101 Air Fryers stuck together. It purports to cook two different dishes at two different temperatures, essentially allowing one to air-fry an entire family meal at once. Sounds great! The problem, however, is that this model’s Quick Start Guide claims the machine can handle two pounds of tater tots or sweet potato fries in each of its two cooking zones. It cannot. No matter how many times we shook the baskets, food was near-burnt at the top and soggy at the bottom. Perhaps hot air couldn’t circulate well enough in the overloaded baskets? When we cooked smaller batches, the Ninja DZ201 behaved more like the Ninja AF101, so points given there. We still found it disappointing, though. At 8L, it has twice the capacity of the AF101, but that’s arguably still not enough room to cook an entire family meal in one go.

The takeaway

If you’re short on counter space but long on money, try the Philips air fryer. Sure, it’s costly, but it bested the competitors—especially with larger volumes of food. And if you’re already set to spend the money and want a larger machine, the Philips’s bigger counterpart, the XXL (with a 7-quart capacity) could feed a family. If you’re long on both money and counter space, you might check out the Instant Omni Pro (and then you can also go ahead and broil or roast if you don’t feel like air-frying). If you have neither a lot of money to spend, nor a lot of people to feed, your best air fryer bet is the Ninja AF101.