The Best Instant Pots

The Instant Pot Pro 10-in-1 is the model that gives a serious home cook the premium hardware without the premium tax. Pro Picks, who aggregates lab data from America's Test Kitchen, Good Housekeeping, and Consumer Reports, singled it out for bridging premium features with smart pricing: it strips the Wi-Fi radio out of the Pro Plus to save you about $50, and you keep everything that actually matters at the counter.

The hardware is the reason to buy it. The flat-bottom stainless inner pot has stay-cool handles and is certified for stovetop use up to 450F, so you can lift it out and deglaze a roast with wine directly on a burner. Standard electric multicookers cannot do that. The 1200W motor preheats about 20 percent faster than a standard Duo, and the five programmable favorite buttons let you save the exact time and pressure for a family recipe and hit it with one touch.

It is not flawless, and the flaws are worth knowing before you buy. Because the stainless pot has no non-stick coating, rice is prone to sticking, and the machine throws burn warnings if you run low on liquid or skip deglazing after sauteing. Susan from Cooking and Calm also found the older Pro's button tones loud and in-your-face. These are quirks of a high-performance pot, not defects.

Two models actually scored higher in our weighting: the Breville Fast Slow Pro and the Instant Pot Pro Max. We left both as runners-up on purpose. The Breville costs around $329 and only makes sense if you pressure cook several times a week, and the $229 Pro Max adds canning and a touchscreen that Pressure Cooking Today found fingerprinty and quirky. For the mainstream buyer, the Pro 10-in-1 delivers the best hardware at a price that makes sense.

The Instant Pot Duo Plus is the safe recommendation that almost never disappoints. Pro Picks calls it America's bestselling pressure cooker and the Toyota Camry of the category because it is brutally dependable. In Good Housekeeping's test of 53 multicookers, the Duo Plus produced perfectly tender rice when nearly everything else failed, and TechRadar's testing had it pressure-cooking chicken until it fell off the bone in 20 minutes.

The Whisper Quiet version adds the upgrades that used to be reserved for pricier models. Susan from Cooking and Calm measured a real drop in release noise from the new steam cap, which channels steam gently backward, and she loved that the release button sits on the opposite side of the lid from the vent to keep nervous fingers safe. Instant Pot also added rubber stabilizers so the inner pot no longer spins while you stir, plus adjustable saute heat that trickled down from the Pro line.

The honest caveats keep it in the value slot rather than the top one. Cooking and Calm called it a terrible slow cooker that needed hacking about to finish a chicken tagine, and its low-pressure results were inconsistent enough that steamed eggs came out over or underdone. She even had to return her first unit over a steam cap that kept falling off. As a pure pressure cooker at a price that regularly drops to $99, though, nothing here beats its performance per dollar.