The Best Pizza Ovens for Crispy, Chewy, Restaurant-Worthy Pies at Home

While many of our favorite pizza ovens are designed for the outdoors due to high temps and open flames, the Ooni Volt 2 is our favorite if you prefer to keep your oven inside.

The Volt 2 has some of our favorite qualities in higher-end ovens. It’s got a high temperature range, so you can make nearly any type of pizza. It has a large enough capacity to produce a 12-in pie. And it comes with easy presets that also keep the temperature consistent and your experience low-maintenance.

“We were able to make really delicious, nearly restaurant-quality pizzas at home with only a few minutes of baking time,” says product tester Alexandra Ginos, RD. “The crusts were well-cooked, the tops were as browned as we liked, and it was easy to customize the temperature for different crust thicknesses and pizza styles.”

Ginos hosted a birthday party and says the oven “performed consistently for approximately 12 pizzas. … I don't think our home oven would have the same results or the same wow factor.”

Ginos did test the oven on non-pizza endeavors like roasted vegetables, but it produced a fair amount of steam. So she really preferred using it for just pizza. Its countertop footprint is also on the larger side.

Still, the oven offers versatility as well as killer pizzas for some of the lowest effort around, and we think it deserves its place in the kitchen.

Cooking pizza in a high-heat oven can be notoriously tricky. If you’re looking for a little bit of support as you get started, we love this option from All-Clad. You’ll still have to cope with the learning curve on dough logistics, and getting your recipe right can take time, though.

The oven comes with a rotating pizza stone to help ensure your pizza cooks more evenly. The stone runs on batteries (so make sure you have extra handy). The oven itself is gas-powered, so you get a flame–based heat system and all the tasty, bubbly crusts that come with it. And you won’t have to fiddle with turning the pizza every few seconds.

This oven is on the expensive side, and it may be a lot for a newbie to spend. But food and health journalist Amy Sowder says: “I like how fast it cooks the pizza — in less than 90 seconds. … It's like a real, full oven, and makes the most professional pizza I've ever had at home.”

“This oven is great, and it does have a helpful thermometer, sturdy housing, and a great aluminum pizza peel, which slides the dough in and pizza out just right, as promised,” she adds. Sowder thinks the rotating stone was “pretty cool and likely helped it brown more evenly,” and she feels cleaning is pretty streamlined.

If you’re new to the pizza-making scene but committed to the process, we think it’s a great starter oven that offers just enough support to make things easier while still letting you get your hands dirty.

This outdoor oven from Ninja is just as functional as any other, but it’s meant to be taken with you and withstand the elements. The Ninja Artisan is built for rain, heat, or shine. Plus, it simplifies the cooking for you with different presets for whatever pizza type you’re craving, including Neapolitan, thin crust, pan, and New York style. With this versatile and beginner-friendly oven, you can make pizzas in minutes. You can also proof your dough and bake other items, like focaccia, if you ever want variety.

You must have a pizza peel in order to use this oven effectively, though. A pizza peel is a large, flat, spatula-like utensil that lets you slide the pizza in and out of the oven with minimal sticking. While we wish it came with this tool, the oven doesn’t, and that presented some challenges.

Writer and editor Nicole Bonaccorso tested this oven. She “liked that its dials offer options for cooking different kinds of pizza and will adjust to the temperature of the recipe you've selected.” This is generally much easier than cooking by flame and by eye with other models.

If you’re looking for a pizza oven that’s really built to do it all, there’s no better option than the Ninja Woodfire. It has eight different setting options for different functions, which, of course, include making some killer pizza.

This oven also allows you to roast meats, bake, broil, dehydrate, and even smoke meats with the addition of wood pellets. It operates from nearly anywhere easily, provided you have a place to plug it in (and possibly an extension cord). So it’s just as functional in the backyard as it is at a tailgate.

We wish it came with some of the more-necessary accessories like a pizza peel. But editor Ashley Ziegler says: “I like the size. It's not overly large, which is nice when you don't have a ton of patio space.” On functionality, she liked the ability to make pizza “quickly and easily.” She also appreciated that it has settings for specific types of crusts.

Overall, Ziegler feels this oven “bakes evenly and quickly, and delivers on wood-fire flavor.” She feels the Ninja is reasonably priced, and she sees her family using it for summer cooking, when the weather is hot and they don’t want to heat up the house.

If you’re looking to entertain with your pizza oven, or if you simply have more mouths to feed regularly, you may want to look into a larger-capacity oven. Our far-and-away favorite is the Gozney Arc XL.

The oven's ability to bake a 16-in pizza may not sound like a big advantage over small ovens. But compared with a 12-in pizza, a 16-in actually has 78% more surface area and will go a lot further feeding people. You can, of course, still make smaller, individual pizzas (and the Arc XL does this well), like the beloved Neapolitan style. That’s because the oven can reach the temperatures required for this special type of crust to become bubbly and chewy.

I was able to test this oven myself. There’s a learning curve to cooking in an oven with only the ability to adjust the flame, and it took me a few failed pies to get my bearings. Once I got it down, though, the pizza came out better than anything I’ve ever produced in a home kitchen. The crust was crisp, the cheese bubbly, and the guests happy.

Living in Southern California, I’ll be using this year-round, and not only for pizza. I’ll also use the oven for cast-iron cooking, meats, dips, and for my household of two, as well as for hosting. My testing sessions did include having the stand, cover, and accessories like a pizza peel and turner, which I think made the experience significantly better. So I recommend adding those on if you plan to purchase this oven.

The smaller sibling of our other favorite from Gozney (the Arc XL), the Arc Lite offers much of the same functionality, but it takes up considerably less space thanks to its compact design. Coming in at roughly 12 x 17 in and under 30 lbs, this oven is the definition of good things that come in small packages.

It reaches the same impressively high temperatures over 900 degrees F. And while it only makes up to a 12-in pizza, it cooks them in a few short minutes, so you can crank out plenty of pies in no time.

Veteran food writer and editor Katie Tuttle tested the Arc Lite. She found the oven to be a convenient size for her home and a high-performing piece of equipment. “This is a fantastic little oven,” she says. “I liked its compact size; it makes it very easy to store and move from my house to my patio.”

After she adjusted to the side-flame style of oven, she produced great pizzas and branched out into cooking other foods. “I even made steaks in it one night, and they turned out wonderfully — juicy with a nice crust on the outside.”

She did attribute much of her success at pizza making to having the assistance of the “starter bundle.” This is sold separately from the oven and includes important accessories like the pizza peel and turner, which enable easy use of the Arc Lite. If you plan to gift this oven, definitely include the starter set with it as well.

The electric Current Model P Smart Oven is a food-loving tech nerd’s dream. You can use it indoors or outdoors, and it comes with an integrated app not just for observing but for controlling your oven. It also has multiple preset oven functions.

This oven also goes up to 850 degrees F, one of the highest temp ranges on our list. That ensures that you get those gorgeous bubbly crusts and brown cheese each and every time. Plus, you can make everything from Neapolitan to New York to Detroit styles, or even frozen pizzas, in the Model P. In fact, you can cook pretty much anything else you throw at it with broil, bake, and sear functions.

Editorial director and health journalist Simone Scully tried the oven out herself. “This is the ultimate foodie gift. If you like making your own pizzas at home (or roasting veggies in the pizza oven, which is both delicious and healthy), this is your new favorite thing,” she says.

Scully loves that the pizza oven is smart, saying it “makes it so much easier to know when your pizza is ready or the temps are right.” On its versatility, she says, “I also like that I can use this inside and outside — a lot of the ovens are one or the other. … This means I can keep it on my patio all summer, then move the oven inside in the winter for family pizza nights all year round.” All of this, plus it makes a darn good pizza — we’re sold.