The 9 Best Instant Pots to Suit Every Kitchen

A #1 bestseller on Amazon, the Duo offers all of the standard Instant Pot features with an extra setting for making homemade yogurt. It also lets you pressure cook on low (in addition to high), so you’ll have more control over the cooking temperature of soups and lentils, which may ultimately prevent them from overcooking into mushy oblivion. It's just $20 more than the most basic Instant Pot model (the Lux) and often goes on sale, so we think this one’s the best bang for your buck.

The Instant Pot Pro sets out to replace ten kitchen appliances including a pressure cooker, slow cooker, saute pan, rice cooker, steamer, yogurt maker, and warmer, and has 28 cooking modes for preparing different dishes. It also has five buttons that allow you to store your favorite settings for recipes you make regularly, giving you the convenience of the one-touch programs but for your own custom recipes.

This model offers everything that the bestselling Duo does, plus settings for making cakes, eggs, and sterilizing. With the sterilize program, you can pasteurize milk, and sterilize baby bottles, jars, and utensils. Another key feature of the Duo Plus is the upgraded display: It’s bigger, bluer, and has brighter LED backlighting than the Duo. So if you ever find yourself straining to read the graphics on your appliances (like, say, in the middle of the night when you're heating up a bottle), look no further.

With endless options for customization, the Ultra is packed with extra features for the home chef who loves to experiment. It offers 21 pre-set temperature options, more than any other Instant Pot model on our list. The Ultra even lets you adjust for altitude, which takes the guesswork out of recipe conversion to provide a more precise cooking time. Unlike other Instant Pots that only have button controls, this one’s smooth dial also makes programming a breeze.

The Smart WiFi multi-cooker has many of the extras that other Instant Pot models offer, along with the addition of WiFi connectivity, which allows you to set, monitor, and control your cooking from virtually anywhere. It also comes with more than 1900 pre-programmed recipes that you can peruse via the Instant Pot app. When your dish is nearly done, you’ll receive an alert on your smart phone, and can even send your recipes and cooking results to your family.

The Instant Pot Max has all the programs and settings as many other models, but it's the interface that's so impressive on this one. It's the only model with a touch screen, which, by default, gives you more cooking options as far as temperature and time. It'll cook up to eight hours, and can be fine tuned to within a half a degree. Also, the days of manually venting your pressure cooker are over, as it has multiple settings to automate that as well.

An Instant Pot that air fries, too? Where do we sign up? This incredibly versatile 11-in-1 machine also pressure cooks, steams, sautés, slow cooks, bakes, roasts, broils, warms, sous vides, and even dehydrates. Two handy lids also make it easy to switch between needs. We challenge you to find a more versatile kitchen appliance.

Not much for pressure cooking or slow cooking? If you're more of a crispy foods person who would appreciate a speedy and highly efficient machine, consider this air frying oven option that can also bake, roast, toast, broil, dehydrate, and rotisserie cook in its included rotating basket.

The 8-quart / 7.5-liter Ninja Foodi Max adds air frying, grilling/ broiling, and dehydrating, to the long list of cooking methods offered by the best Instant Pots. It even offers the ability to introduce steam when air frying, which when paired with the built-in thermometer, ensures you can cook the perfect steak in this multi-cooker.