5 Best Toasters, Tested & Reviewed by Experts (2025)

Small appliances like toasters seem like such simple little gadgets, especially compared to all those multi-use toaster ovens. But one problem with the best toaster ovens: They take up a lot of space. Many are so big they can roast an entire chicken. While good toaster ovens can do a lot of different things, not everyone needs a countertop device that’s a broiler and an air fryer and that can reheat a whole pizza while doing your son’s math homework. Sometimes you just need toast.

The best toasters

We tested over 25 different toasters—cheap plastic toasters, techy toasters, aesthetically pleasing toasters. Our favorites keep things simple, the way a good toaster should, while also offering extra features here and there that enhance the toasting experience in thoughtful ways. They’re relatively compact, sturdy, and easy to use. Most importantly, they deliver all the crispy, evenly browned carbs you want in the morning: pieces of toast, English muffins, frozen waffles, and bagels.

Best two-slice toaster: Breville A Bit More

What we love: The Breville “A Bit More” toaster is a sleek appliance with luxe touches that’ll get you excited to make your morning toast every day. It has easy-to-use digital controls including a slider with five browning levels. It also has toast, bagel, and cancel buttons along with the eponymous feature, which allows you to extend your toasting time just slightly if your bread looks a little underdone when it pops out.

Another nice feature: The lights that indicate the doneness setting black out one by one, serving as a countdown to let you know your toast is almost ready. Testers used this model on white bread, sourdough, frozen waffles, and bagels; it performed consistently well across all of them. It did take longer (over four minutes on the highest toast setting) than other toasters in the test, but our patience was rewarded with evenly browned toast and a healthy range of browning on each heat setting.

What we’d leave: This two-slice model is oriented horizontally, meaning the buttons and sliders are on the long side of the toaster. So if you have a small kitchen with counters that are already crowded with coffee makers and knife blocks, it might be a tight fit. We also found that the side of the toast facing outwards tended to be slightly paler, but this was a common fault amongst most of the toasters we tested.

Best four-slice toaster: Breville Die-Cast

What we love: While the Breville “A Bit More” above does come in a four-slice version, we liked Breville’s other 4-slice toaster, the Die-Cast, more. Both toasters have a four-slice capacity, but the Die-Cast has four individual slots, while the Bit More just has two super-long slots that could fit four slices of bread at a time or two extra-long slices of bread. That means the Die-Cast model is more flexible for different toasting preferences, allowing one person to toast their bagel the way they want it and another person to defrost a waffle to their specification at the same time. Instead of a regular manual lever, the Die-Cast also has a luxurious motorized “lift and look” function that slowly raises your toast like baby Simba from The Lion King. This might seem ostentatious, even wholly unnecessary, but it’s a thoughtful addition that helps prevent you from digging your finished toast out of the slot with a fork (don’t ever stick a fork in the toaster, people).

What we’d leave: We did notice the middle slots of the Die-Cast would brown bread more intensely than the ones on the outside, most likely just from the position of the heating elements. This is also a pretty expensive toaster, but we still think the smartly designed interface makes it a top pick.

Best budget toaster: Professional Series Wide Slot

What we love: Not everyone has the budget for a $100 toaster (or wants to spend $100 on a toaster even if they do). For high performance at a low price, we’d point you to this budget model from Continental Electric. It doesn’t include some of the Breville’s luxury features, like a light-up interface, but it’s still a high-quality kitchen appliance that, at the time of writing, costs a cool $35. At this price point, you’re often left with a plastic toaster as opposed to a stainless-steel one like this, so the Professional Series is a real value. It browns both thin and thick slices of bread to golden brown beauty in under two minutes, chirping a poppy little “ding” when it’s done. It has settings for bagels and frozen foods that work well, as well as a handy reheat setting for warming already-toasted bread. The removable crumb tray makes cleanup a breeze, and at only nine inches across it fits nicely on smaller countertops.

What we’d leave: The Professional Series will really pop your toast or bagel out like a slingshot once it’s done. It spit finished slices of toast out with such ferocity, lighter pieces of bread were sometimes flung onto the counter—though they sometimes landed squarely on top of the machine, which felt very Wallace and Gromit. We leave it to you whether you find this preferable to the machines that make you really fish your toast out. Otherwise this is great toaster.