Best indoor pizza ovens – I've scoured the market and found the only three worth considering

Pizza ovens are great, but even the best models have a glaring flaw: they can't be used in winter. We're heading into fall, and as temperatures get lower you won't want to stand around in the cold waiting for your pizza to cook.

Even the best gas and wood pizza ovens can't overcome this flaw, but there are a handful of models out there rated for indoor use. I've tested the best pizza ovens for years, and I've used every one of these ovens first-hand to make a range of different pizzas and other foods.

The very best indoor pizza oven is the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo, with the Ooni Volt 12 a close runner-up. These ovens are pretty expensive, so you can also consider the Cuisinart Indoor Pizza Oven, though it has some drawbacks to bear in mind.

The quick list

Best indoor pizza ovens 2024

Best indoor pizza oven

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This was the first ever indoor pizza oven to hit the market, and in my years of testing these ovens, I'm yet to find a better option. Of all the indoor ovens out there, it gets closest to the leopard-spotted charred finish you usually get from a wood-fired pizza oven. The pizzas we've made in this oven are the nearest to restaurant-quality of any indoor oven I've tested, with delicious leopard spotting, a perfect crust, and golden, melted cheese.

One of the best features of this oven is that it's easy to use. Unlike every oven I've tested, there are dedicated settings for different types of pizza. If you want a New York slice, just switch it to that setting. You can do the same for deep dish, thin and crispy, and there's even a dedicated setting for frozen pizzas. You can set the temperature more precisely if you need to, but I found that the settings make the whole process foolproof. Unlike other pizza ovens out there - especially the Cuisinart below - the timer is pretty accurate.

On top of that, the price has recently come down by $200, which makes it cheaper than the Ooni Volt 12 below. They used to be the same price, so this is one of the things that puts it above the Ooni. However, $800 is still a lot to spend on a pizza oven. My personal favorite, the Ooni Fyra 12, is hundreds of dollars cheaper and frankly makes better pizza.

That's something to bear in mind as you read this list: none of the indoor ovens featured here quite match a gas oven, and a wood-fired oven tastes even better. There's a smokiness to those pizzas that these indoor ovens can't match, though the Breville Smart Oven gets closest.

You can find more details in our Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo review.

Best indoor and outdoor pizza oven

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At the time of writing, the Ooni Volt 12 is the only pizza oven you can use both indoors and outdoors. That means it's perfect for year-round use; unlike most pizza ovens, you won't be freezing outdoors while you try to make a pie, and when the warm weather rolls back around in spring you won't be stuck in a stuffy kitchen next to a hot oven.

By indoor oven standards, it makes pretty great pizzas. It made a delicious artichoke pizza with the same stone-baked crust you'd find in a traditional pizzeria. However, our tester found that 'Something about the Breville felt a little more authentic than the Ooni.' The leopard-spotting is better in the Breville, so it looks and tastes a little better. However, it's very tight to call. You wouldn't be disappointed if you were served one of the pizzas from this oven in a restaurant.

The best part of this oven is all the little touches. The first is that it's fast, especially By indoor oven standards. Ooni recommends a preheat time of 20 minutes but our tests found it reached temperature in around 15. This speed is coupled with an innovative 'boost' button, which maintains the temperature even when the door is open. That means you can turn out pizzas one after the other without waiting for the oven to heat back up, which is a unique feature among pizza ovens, let alone indoor pizza ovens. It's much easier to use than the Breville oven above.

So why isn't it number one? Well, this oven is poorly suited to use indoors. It's huge - it's more than two feet deep and nearly two feet across. If you're cooking in a small kitchen, which is one of the main use cases for an indoor pizza oven, you'll have to give up half your counter space. This also makes it very hard to store, as it will take up the entire shelf of a base cabinet and you may not be able to close the door. The Breville above is pretty big, but it's at least manageable, a half-foot shorter than the Ooni. The Volt 12 also weighs in at 39lbs, so while you can lift it out of storage or into your backyard, it's not a process that you'll want to do very often.

On top of that, like all Ooni pizza ovens, the Volt 12 doesn't come with helpful equipment like a pizza peel or a thermometer - if you want these, you'll need to pay at least $1000. This is a great oven, but a thousand dollars is a lot of money to spend on pizza, no matter how good.

You can find more details in our Ooni Volt 12 review.

Best budget indoor pizza oven

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The Cuisinart Indoor Pizza Oven is a rare thing: an indoor pizza oven that doesn't cost too much. The two ovens above cost at least $800 outside of sales periods, which is far too much money for most people. This oven retails for around $400, though you'll often see it on offer for more like $300, which is more than half as cheap as the two ovens above. It's also much better than Ooni in that it includes a pizza peel, slice, and deep dish for free, saving you money and ensuring you're ready to go straight out of the box.

Best of all, it's simple to use, so it's a great option for beginners. Unlike Ooni ovens, which need a steep learning curve and fiddly propane or wood attachments, you just put the pizza stone in this and it's good to go. The temperature control and timers are old-fashioned analog dials, so you don't need to learn any operations, just switch them on.

However, when I was testing this oven I found that it doesn't stack up to the ovens above. It's also loud. Most pizza ovens are relatively quiet, but my decibel meter found that this pizza oven tops out at 60 dB. That's similar to a cheap air fryer; it's not the worst sound in the world, but it's louder than the competition.

Most importantly, this oven makes pretty good pizza, but unlike the Breville and Ooni, it's not much better than the pizza you can make in a typical kitchen oven. The base of the crust was well cooked, but the dough was undercooked, even though the cheese on the top of the pizza was overcooked. Both pizzas I made tasted like store-bought frozen pizza, despite being made by hand.

It's much slower than other pizza ovens I've used. The Breville and Ooni above are slow by pizza oven standards - it takes them around three or four minutes to cook a pizza - but they're much faster than this. When you consider that a gas- or wood-fired pizza oven can cook a pizza in a minute, the 7 minutes needed for the Cuisinart Indoor Pizza Oven feels like an age.

I found that it's pretty poor when making other types of food. We test all our ovens on lots of different meals to see if they're versatile, and this oven couldn't handle a tray of brownies. They were baked solid at the rear of the oven and uncooked in the middle, which isn't what you want from any oven. As I tested this oven, there were several times when I wondered if I should give up and cook my ingredients in the oven.

There are more details in my full Cuisinart Indoor Pizza Oven Review.

Comparison table

Indoor pizza oven FAQs

Should I buy an indoor pizza oven or an outdoor pizza oven?

There are only two reasons to buy an indoor pizza oven. The first is if your home lacks a yard or other outdoor space. In this case, an indoor pizza oven is your best bet for delicious homemade pizza. A pizza oven is also a good idea if you live somewhere cold. If it snows a lot, an outdoor pizza oven might not be practical, and an indoor pizza oven will offer you year-round use.

However, if neither of these applies, you should buy an outdoor pizza oven. These cook on gas and wood, which is much closer to a traditional pizza oven than an electric filament. Indoor pizza ovens can taste great, but they're much closer to a homemade pizza made in a domestic oven than a gas or wood pizza oven. That's because gas and wood outdoor pizza ovens can reach much higher temperatures, which broil the top of the pizza and bake the dough into a crisp crust.

How much should I spend on an indoor oven?

The two best ovens are at least $800, so expect to pay at least that much. There are some options out there for around $400, but they aren't always the best quality.

What type of indoor pizza oven should I get?

If you can, avoid a rotating pizza oven like this at Amazon, because it doesn't work, and if it did, wouldn't taste any different to a domestic oven. Instead, you need an electric pizza oven with a door. The door retains the heat, making the oven more efficient.

Indoor pizza ovens aren't your only option for good homemade pizza. If money is tight, it's also worth considering a toaster oven for fast, apartment-friendly pizza.