Nothing revives leftover french fries or crisps up a handful of dino nuggets quite like an air fryer. If you’re looking for a compact kitchen appliance to bridge the gap between a microwave and a conventional oven, a pod-shaped air fryer might do the trick.
Using convection baking—basically a powerful fan that circulates hot air around your food—an air fryer crisps food like an oven does, but it heats up and cooks much faster.
We’ve tested dozens of models since 2017, and we recommend the Philips 3000 Series Airfryer L HD9200/91 or its touchscreen-operated twin, the HD9252/91. It crisps food quickly and evenly, and its interface is straightforward and minimal (though the manual dials can be difficult to turn). And it’s the best price we’ve seen for this level of performance.
Our pick
With a simple interface and a great price, this no-frills air fryer heats fast and crisps quickly and evenly.
This variant performs identically to our top pick, but has a touch screen that we found less straightforward to use, and often costs a bit more.
The 3-quart (by our measurement) Philips 3000 Series Airfryer L HD9200/91 gets food crispy quickly, cooking faster and more evenly than any other machine we’ve tested in this price range. It’s also easy to use and clean.
This air fryer crisped chicken nuggets, fries, and wings nearly as well as our upgrade pick, the Philips Premium Airfryer HD9741. It has a minimal display, with just a temperature dial and a timer. The air fryer basket is relatively easy to clean, with a nonstick coating and a less frustrating grate design than those of other air fryers we tested.
The Philips 3000 Series Airfryer L HD9252/91 is the same air fryer as the HD9200/91, but this one has a touch screen instead of dials. Neither display is perfect. The touchscreen is cluttered with unhelpful preset programs and can be hard to activate with greasy fingers. The dials, though refreshingly simple, are too close together. And the timer dial is hard to turn counterclockwise, which you have to do if you want to turn the air fryer off before time is up (better to just unplug the machine). But neither display is a dealbreaker.
These machines are slim, look inoffensive, and have small footprints for air fryers of this capacity. The Philips Airfryer L with dials typically costs around $120, and the Philips Airfryer L with a touchscreen around $150, where other similarly performing air fryers cost roughly double that, or as much as one of our (more durable and versatile) convection toaster oven picks.
A note on size: We’ve found the listed capacities of Philips air fryers to be inconsistent and inaccurate. The Premium Airfryer HD9741, our upgrade pick, is incorrectly listed as one quart larger than the Airfryer L. We measured the volume of our two Philips picks, and they both have approximately a 3-quart volume (the Premium measures 3.1 quarts, and the Airfryer L 2.9 quarts).
Upgrade pick
This air fryer cooked the fastest and most evenly of any air fryer we tested, and the interface, with a smooth dial and manual buttons, is one of the easiest to use.
The 3-quart Philips Premium Airfryer HD9741 is one of the best pod-shaped air fryers out there. It cooked the crispiest french fries and the most evenly golden chicken nuggets. We also like that it has only four preprogrammed settings: frozen fries, chicken, fish, and meat, all of which you access through a single dial on the control panel. More settings on other machines felt like overkill, since we ended up just using the manual settings regardless.
But the basket of this machine is very heavy, and the price tag is steep—we think this machine is most worth it if it’s on sale, or if you truly need the speed and convenience of a deluxe pod. Otherwise, you could get more bang for your buck with a similarly priced convection toaster oven.
Also great
The Instant Vortex Mini is small, powerful, and one of the cheapest models we tested. While the wee basket can fit only one serving of food at a time, the machine circulates heat fairly well and manages to cook food without dehydrating it.
With a 2-quart capacity, the Instant Vortex Mini 4-in-1 is the smallest air fryer we tested, but it held its own against much larger machines. Though the Instant Mini’s square basket is a quart smaller than that of the Philips Airfryer L or the Philips Premium HD9741, it comfortably fits one or two servings of food thanks to its wide, shallow shape.
This air fryer cooked as fast and almost as evenly as our other picks. Its streamlined interface has only four preprogrammed settings—air fry, roast, bake, and reheat—all operated by a single dial, which makes the Vortex Mini easy to use right out of the box. Plus, the air fryer is lightweight, with a diminutive footprint and the lightest basket of any air fryer we tested.
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