News

Oct 20, 2024

The Best Stand Mixers of 2024, Tested & Reviewed

We independently evaluate all of our recommendations. If you click on links we provide, we may receive compensation. We tested 22 top-rated models to find our favorite picks for home bakers. In This

We independently evaluate all of our recommendations. If you click on links we provide, we may receive compensation.

We tested 22 top-rated models to find our favorite picks for home bakers.

In This Article

Food & Wine / Russell Kilgore

Baking is one of the toughest cooking methods to master. There are baking cookbooks with tips and tricks from professional chefs, but kneading bread and cutting butter into pastry can be finicky, especially if you're mixing by hand. The best stand mixers automate all of that, enabling you to get the perfect consistency in everything from cookies to sandwich bread.

"We use a stand mixer in the bakery all the time for small projects both savory and sweet, whipping cream cheese, small-batch cookie recipes, research, and development," says Zak Stern of Zak the Baker in Miami, a James Beard Outstanding Baker Award semifinalist. He looks for mixers with heavy-duty construction: "I want to buy tools built strong enough to pass down to my kids. I try to avoid all the bells and whistles. Those are typically the first things to break."

A stand mixer is also a must-have for Sarah O'Brien, owner of Little Tart Bakeshop in Atlanta and a 2022 James Beard Award semifinalist for Outstanding Baker. "I cream the butter for my cookies to the max, so I need one with a good motor," she says.

With the help of these two bakers (and our in-house team of experts), we put 22 of the best stand mixers to the test. We tested both classic and new brands, making batch upon batch of whipped cream, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and whole wheat bread dough.

This quiet-yet-powerful mixer does the job quickly, with efficient presets and automated timers.

It can't fit any optional attachments or extras.

On top of its high power and quality materials, this Breville stand mixer is a nice size for any counter. It completed every task in our testing quickly with minimal noise and mess. It whipped cream to stiff peaks in 18 seconds, far faster than any other model, and it mixed cookie dough and kneaded bread dough evenly, efficiently, and quietly.

We like that the 12 speed settings are helpfully named for their purpose — knead, beat, whip — and the built-in timer is fantastic. You can set a mixing session and move on to the rest of your recipe, knowing that the machine will shut off automatically. We also love the integrated light to illuminate the contents of the bowl.

The Breville Bakery Chef comes with separate glass and steel bowls and all the standard blades and beaters, and it's only slightly above average in price. That's honestly a really solid deal. The only big reason we can think of that you might want to skip this mixer is if you're looking to expand its functions with additional attachments. Unlike KitchenAid and some other brands, there aren't compatible meat grinders, pasta rollers, or similar accessories.

Dimensions: 11.4 x 14.8 x 14.3 inches | Power: 550 watts | Capacity: 5 quarts | Weight: 21 pounds | Includes: 5-quart glass bowl, 4-quart stainless steel bowl, scraper beater, flat beater, dough hook, whisk, splash guard, pouring shield, spatula

This high-powered mixer is compact, effective, and exceptionally versatile.

It's expensive, and the tilt-head design makes it tough to see inside while mixing.

This space-age-looking mixer is appealing for modern kitchens, and it's much more powerful than its compact form would make you guess. The bowl and attachments can all go in the dishwasher, and we found Kenwood's splash guard especially helpful at keeping the base (and our counters) clean. It was a little slow in whipping cream in our tests, but it mixed everything thoroughly and effectively, and it was quite quick at kneading bread dough.

If you want to expand the abilities of your mixer, the Kenwood has four different attachment points for various accessories you can buy, from a slicer to a blender to an ice cream maker. Unfortunately, all of those cost extra money on top of this machine's already high price. Our other design quibble is that the tilt-head sits very low over the bowl, making it hard to see the contents during mixing, as well as to close and lock in place when the bowl is full of stiff dough.

Dimensions: 8.9 x 15.7 x 11.7 inches | Power: 750 watts | Capacity: 5 quarts | Weight: 23 pounds | Includes: 5-quart stainless steel bowl, K-beater, flexi beater, whisk, dough hook, spatula, spanner, splash guard

The easy-to-access bowl-lift mechanism makes this extra-large mixer extra-stable.

It's quite expensive.

*Editor's note: We tested the KitchenAid Pro Line Series 7-Quart Bowl-Lift Stand Mixer, which is no longer available. This version is nearly identical, at a slightly lower price.

"I love my KitchenAid," O'Brien says, "I felt like a real grown-up when I got my first one." She's had the same model at home for more than 15 years, and it's an older version of this 7-quart monster. (It's "the biggest one I can get!" she enthuses.) Rather than the head tilting down into the bowl like with smaller KitchenAid mixers, this one uses a crank to lift and lock the bowl in place under the stationary motor. It's more stable than the tilt-head design: This bowl-lift model was quieter and less wobbly than the other three KitchenAids we tested.

The redesigned 7-quart KitchenAid comes with more attachments than most of its brand-mates, including a whisk, dough hook, and three separate beaters: the standard flat beater, a flat beater with silicone bowl-scraping edges, and a special pastry beater made to cut cold butter into flour for croissants and other types of pastry recipes. We were most impressed in testing by how well the large mixer handled small amounts; it was able to reach all parts of the bowl even when it was mostly empty. If you have the space (and the money), it's a good option whether you're feeding large or small groups.

Dimensions: 14 x 16.5 x 11.5 inches | Power: 650 watts | Capacity: 7 quarts | Weight: 35.3 pounds | Includes: 7-quart stainless steel bowl, flat beater, flex edge beater, pastry beater, dough hook, whisk, pouring shield, pastry beater scraper

This professional-style mixer offers a big bowl, infinitely variable speeds, and quiet operation.

It's very expensive, and struggled to fully scrape down the sides of the deep bowl.

A serious workhorse, the Wolf Gourmet is a heavy-duty machine equally at home on a home countertop as in a restaurant kitchen. Its 7-quart bowl can handle larger recipes, and the motor is designed to keep spinning at the same speed no matter how much strain it's under. Rather than a limited number of settings, the Wolf's dial rotates to raise and lower the speed smoothly through its full range.

In testing, the Wolf easily handled whipped cream. It performed especially quickly with cookie dough. It struggled a bit kneading bread dough, as the hook didn't effectively reach everything stuck to the sides of the deep bowl. We had to stop and scrape it down a few times for best results. The mixing bowl isn't dishwasher-safe, though we did note that it didn't have any crevices and joints to hold onto bits of food while hand-washing.

The biggest downside of the Wolf mixer is its price. This was the most expensive mixer we tested, at more than triple the average. But like all of the brand's appliances, it's built to last for years.

Dimensions: 20 x 19.5 x 13.1 inches | Power: 500 watts | Capacity: 7 quarts | Weight: 36.2 pounds | Includes: 7-quart stainless steel bowl, flat beater, whisk, dough hook, pouring/splash shield

This compact version of the classic KitchenAid is useful for any avid baker with tight kitchen space.

The capacity is small, and it's unstable when completely full.

This tiny version of the classic KitchenAid is ideal for cooks with big aspirations who have small kitchens. The Mini works just like the other two KitchenAid models on our list, only with a smaller capacity and less weight. It has 10 speeds and comes with the standard set of a beater, dough hook, and whisk. It's compatible with most of KitchenAid's handy attachments, from meat grinder to pasta maker to spiralizer.

The Mini's beater blade has a flexible silicone edge to scrape the sides of the bowl, and we found that effective in thoroughly incorporating cookie dough quickly. It also had no trouble in our whipped cream test, turning in one of the faster times. Kneading dough, however, was not its strength. A one-loaf recipe was able to fit in the bowl (barely), but the low-power motor got very loud, and the whole machine wobbled across the table.

Dimensions: 7.8 x 12.3 x 12.3 inches | Power: 250 watts | Capacity: 3.5 quarts | Weight: 18 pounds | Includes: 3.5-quart stainless steel bowl, flex edge beater, dough hook, whisk

This heavy-duty, multifunctional mixer is built to last a lifetime.

It can be loud and wobbly under heavy load.

The KitchenAid stand mixer is an icon of the modern kitchen. This machine's streamlined look, twist-to-lock bowl, and simple controls haven't changed much since they were first introduced in 1937, and it's a testament to how well-designed the thing is that it's still a best-seller almost a century later. That applies to pros as much as home cooks, too: Stern says he loves KitchenAid because the mixers are "classic, strong, and easy to repair if necessary." Plus, you can get the mixers in dozens of attractive colors and patterns.

In testing, the 5-quart Artisan worked somewhat slower than competitors, but it whipped, combined, and kneaded reliably, evenly, and thoroughly. It's easy to clean, with a dishwasher-safe bowl and attachments that have smooth surfaces and fewer corners to catch crumbs. The motor placement makes it top-heavy, however, which leads to wobbling and shaking when running at high speed. It's also on the loud side. The price is a little higher than average, though this is a machine that can last you for decades.

Dimensions: 14 x 13 x 8 inches | Power: 325 watts | Capacity: 5 quarts | Weight: 29 pounds | Includes: 5-quart stainless steel bowl, flat beater, dough hook, whisk, pouring shield

Our best overall mixer, the Bakery Chef by Breville, outperformed the competition across all tests. The brand is known for its quality, and this model is a sure bet for any level of baker looking for a quality build with nice aesthetics. In second place, the Kenwood 5-Quart Chef Titanium Kitchen Machine is versatile and super-powerful, albeit more expensive.

Food & Wine / Russell Kilgore

We chose a total of 22 stand mixers to try out side-by-side in our lab. We made notes on general design, size, and setup, and put them through a trio of real-world tests.

After completing the above observations, we revealed the retail prices of the mixers to consider value. At the time of testing, the models ranged from $40 to $1,000, with an average of $315. Following these tests, we continued to use the nine top-performing mixers for everyday kitchen tasks, checking in after 2 months and 6 months to note any long-term issues.

Food & Wine / Russell Kilgore

The "standard" bowl size for stand mixers is about 5 quarts. That's plenty of room to knead a full loaf of bread or mix a double-recipe of most cookies. To save on space and cost, there are mini models as small as 3 quarts, but these can be overwhelmed by even a single large batch of dough. For the high-volume baker, you can size up to a 7- or 8-quart mixer. Of course, these cost more, and they may not be able to fully combine small batches. A few mixers include two bowls of different sizes, effectively giving them two different capacities at once.

Essentially every stand mixer comes with three attachments: a whisk, a dough hook, and a paddle. These can cover pretty much every use, but some models offer additional specialty tools. One that we found especially helpful in testing was a paddle with flexible silicone or rubber edges. This scrapes the full interior of the bowl to make sure nothing sticks or fails to mix.

In addition to the included attachments, most mixers have a slot for connecting additional accessories. This can include anything from a meat grinder to an ice cream maker to a full-on blender. The attachments cost extra but add lots of versatility. Before you buy one, though, make sure it's compatible with your specific model of mixer.

As essential as they feel as kitchen products for home cooks, stand mixers are notorious for being countertop hogs. Their motors are heavy, and their bowls and bases often occupy a lot of space. Weight is not a bad thing in this case. The lighter mixers we tested jumped all over the counter, while heftier ones remained stable even at high speed. The fact is that a stand mixer is most likely going to have to live on your countertop. Consider it a badge of honor marking your kitchen as home to an accomplished cook.

If you are looking for a more portable option that can be tucked away in a cabinet, consider a hand mixer. It's not quite as powerful as a stand mixer but can be used in any bowl you like.

Food & Wine / Russell Kilgore

A stand mixer is great for sweet and savory recipes, and not just baked goods. It automates every kind of mixing, from beating eggs to whipping cream to stirring together craft projects like slime. When it comes to kneading bread dough, the stand mixer saves tons of effort over hand-kneading, and its steady speed and power give you consistent results every time. It's a timeless kitchen item you'll find plenty of use for, the more you use it.

There are two main layout options for a stand mixer: A tilt-head mixer has its motor in a hinged top that lowers into a fixed bowl, and a bowl-lift mixer has a fixed motor with a bowl that raises and lowers beneath it. The bowl-lift style is more common in large-capacity mixers as it's less top-heavy and more stable.

You can also find mixers in every color under the rainbow. Some brands even release limited-edition colors and patterns in collaboration with chefs and artists.

A quality stand mixer is an investment, but with proper care, you can expect it to last for at least 10 years. The key to keeping your mixer going is to not overtax the motor. If you hear it straining or feel it getting hot, turn down the speed, cut your recipe in half, or just shut it off and let it cool down for a few minutes between mixing sessions.

The parts of a mixer that are more likely to wear out sooner are also the most replaceable. Many brands sell individual dough hooks, whisks, paddles, and bowls that are far cheaper than buying a whole new machine.

KitchenAid is the most famous name in stand mixers, and we weren't surprised to find three of its models at the top of our results. The motors and controls of all KitchenAid mixers work in largely the same way, but there a multiple formats and sizes. The Artisan series is comprised of KitchenAid's tilt-head mixers, the classic design that you probably picture when you hear the brand name. The KitchenAid 5-Quart Artisan Series is the standard version, while the KitchenAid Artisan Mini is its 3.5-quart little brother. KitchenAid's larger-capacity mixers use a bowl-lift mechanism. These come in four different sizes: 5.5 quarts, 6 quarts, 7 quarts, and an 8-quart commercial model.

These models are all available in many colors, but different retailers have different sets of colors in stock. If you're looking for something beyond the easy-to-find black, white, and red, try checking multiple sites.

Smeg Stand Mixer ($540 at Amazon)

The stylish Smeg was able to handle all of our tests with few issues. It's a beautiful and effective machine. We took away points, though, for the high-pitched whine its motor made at every speed, and for its comparatively high price.

GE Tilt-Head Electric Stand Mixer ($300 at Amazon)

GE's take on the classic stand mixer is fairly inexpensive and powerful enough for most kinds of everyday baking. It's a basic machine at a basic price. We only ran into two minor issues in testing: It sprayed out some messy flour onto the base while making bread, and its 10-minute automatic shutoff doesn't allow enough time for full kneading in a single session.

Cuisinart 5.5-Quart Stand Mixer ($250 at Amazon)

Another value-priced no-frills mixer, the Cuisinart did quite well with whipped cream and cookie dough. But when it ran for a longer time while kneading bread dough, the motor became worryingly hot and loud.

The main problem with machines that finished toward the bottom of our tests was lack of power. Their motors struggled with tough doughs and made the unstable machines jump and jiggle all over the counter. We found that it's not worth cheaping out on a stand mixer: None of the models that retail for less than $200 wound up in the top half of the rankings.