Breville Toaster Oven Guide: Which Is Best for You?

Breville is making the best residential countertop ovens money can buy. Full stop. And there are plenty of options to suit nearly any home cook’s needs or space constraints.

Some of our Breville faves

Breville’s smallest (and cheapest) oven: The Mini Smart Oven
An affordable, versatile Breville air-fryer oven: The Smart Oven Air Fryer
Breville’s premiere oven with app connectivity: The Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro

The offerings range from “high-end toaster oven” to a super-smart convection air-fryer oven that easily out-performs most full-size ovens. But it’s the “everything in between” that gets confusing—so confusing that I, a person who reviews these small appliances professionally, often has a hard time keeping them straight.

The seven smart ovens Breville sells in the US all look fairly similar, with brushed stainless-steel finishes, sleek control knobs, and LCD display screens. They also all have removable racks and crumb trays, as well as the A Bit More button Breville created to add a little extra cooking time (especially helpful when making frozen pizza!).

On their own, those similarities wouldn’t necessarily cause confusion. But when you add in the fact that these ovens—which all have some combination of the same features and presets—are also very similarly named, it can be really hard to understand your options. So before you try to decide which Breville you should buy, it’s helpful to understand the features that define (and differentiate) them.

Understanding Breville’s smart oven features

Below, find all the information you need to help compare Breville smart ovens and figure out which is the best one for you to buy.

The Mini Smart Oven

The Breville Mini Smart Oven is currently Breville’s smallest and most affordable countertop oven and it’s the one that most closely resembles an old-school toaster oven. It employs Breville’s smart technology for the eight typical toaster-oven-type cooking jobs (toast, broil, reheat, and more) but this one is not a convection toaster oven and does not air fry because it doesn’t have a convection fan. Though it has a small footprint, it’s still pretty roomy inside; the rack can fit four slices of toast at a time or accommodate an 11-inch pizza pan. It doesn’t come with such a pizza pan but you will get a 10-x10-inch baking pan.

The Compact Smart Oven

The Breville Compact Smart Oven is another fairly basic option, but it still has a lot going for it, especially considering the sub-$200 price tag. Size-wise, it’s quite a bit wider than the Mini above and is roomy enough inside to accommodate a 12-inch pizza pan or a whole chicken. Though basic, this oven does employ Breville’s Element IQ technology to optimize the eight smart cooking functions which include roast, bake, cookies, and pizza. There’s no convection fan though, so you can’t use this model to air fry.

The Smart Oven Pro

The Breville Smart Oven Pro is a good option for someone who wants a countertop oven mostly for the kind of cooking you’d do in a regular, full-size oven—but not if you also want to air fry. This model has 10 preset functions, including bake, broil, pizza, cookies, and reheat. There’s also a slow cook setting that will hold a low temperature for up to 10 hours before automatically going into keep warm mode. It’s roomy enough inside for a 13-inch pizza, a whole chicken, or a 9-cup muffin pan and the rack can hold six slices of bread at once. Though this oven does have a convection fan, it lacks Breville’s dual/Super Convection feature and therefore is not an air fryer oven.

The Smart Oven Air Fryer Compact

Small kitchen? Big fan of air frying? The Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Compact is a space-saving air fryer-toaster oven combo with a fairly accessible price—especially considering everything it can do. This model has five air-fryer-specific presets on the knob (air fry, fries, wings, bacon, and crispy reheat) plus five other presets (bake/roast, broil, pizza, bagel, and toast). It’s Breville’s most affordable air fryer oven and though it’s compact, it’s still roomy enough inside to hold a whole chicken or an 11-inch pizza, and a single rack can toast four slices of bread at once.

The Smart Oven Air Fryer

The Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer is considered one of Breville’s large capacity ovens (you can cook a 14-pound turkey in it) and it has 11 presets, including bake, roast, slow cook, and air fry. In addition to a brushed stainless steel finish, this model also comes in more than 10 other finishes, though availability varies by retailer and pricing varies by finish. With a standard finish, this is Breville’s most affordable full-size air fryer oven and it’s a great option if you want a really versatile air fryer oven that’s big enough for a whole bird or a 13-inch pizza pan.

The Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro

The Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro is a high-end air fryer oven with 13 cooking modes, precise temperature control, an impressively large capacity, and enough versatility to make nearly all of your other countertop cookers obsolete. This is one of only two Breville ovens with proof and dehydrate functions and there’s enough room inside for 9 slices of toast, a 13-inch pizza, a whole chicken, and even a 14-pound turkey. It comes with two reversible oven racks which turn four rack slots into eight rack positions, a 13-inch nonstick pizza pan, a 9 x 13-inch enameled roasting pan with a broiling rack, and a mesh basket rack for air frying and dehydrating. It will also accommodate any quarter sheet pan. Most home cooks would likely be very content using the Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro as their primary oven, and until Breville released the Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro (more on that below), this was the brand’s premiere oven offering as well as our top pick for best toaster oven. We still recommend it as the best air fryer oven. Yes, it’s an investment, but it eliminates the need for a handful of other small kitchen appliances and in turn, frees up some valuable counter space.

The Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro

We’ve written extensively about our love for the Breville Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro (which you can read here, here, and here). Capacity and feature-wise, it’s nearly identical to the Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro above, but it has one game-changing difference: It connects to an actually-useful companion app that unlocks three additional cooking modes and takes nearly all the guesswork out of cooking and baking, right down to crispy or not crispy bacon.

Generally speaking, small appliance companion apps are just okay; they can be helpful for firmware updates, customer support, and if you’re lucky, they might even have some good recipes. The Breville+ app, on the other hand, allows you to cook in something called Autopilot that, for example, will cycle through 13 different temperature and convection combinations to make a seriously impressive rotisserie-style roast chicken—with a single tap in the app. Without connecting to the app, you can still use and modify the oven’s 13 built-in presets via the control panel so it functions as a toaster, conventional oven, air fryer, broiler, slow cooker, dehydrator, and more.

All of that said, when you use this model without using the app, it’s basically the Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro above, so if you are actively anti-app for your appliances, you can save a little money on the Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro. And if you know for sure you’re also not going to proof dough or use the dehydrator (which is really handy when you’re trying to dry bread for stuffing), you can save even more with the Smart Oven Air Fryer.