This era of modern toasters can feel a lot like speed dating. Even expensive toasters, which may start off making perfect toast, can quickly turn spotty or go kaput. After a brief time you’re onto the next toaster, and the next, and so on. You get the idea.
Unfortunately, no matter how much you spend, toasters aren’t made to last like they once were. That’s why we recommend the relatively inexpensive Cuisinart CPT-122 2-Slice Compact Plastic Toaster.
After toasting mountains of carbs in 32 toasters over the years, we think the Cuisinart offers the best balance of performance, quality, and features without asking you to overspend. We can’t guarantee it will toast evenly over time or last for decades (few modern toasters do). But we do think you’ll get your money’s worth.
You may also want to consider getting a toaster oven instead—they’re far more versatile than a slot toaster, and, in our experience, they’re also more reliable.
Top pick
This inexpensive, ordinary-looking toaster browned bread more evenly than almost any other model we tested. Toasters aren’t known for their longevity, so we like that the Cuisinart is covered by a three-year warranty.
This four-slot toaster consistently browned bread as evenly as its two-slot counterpart. If you have the space, however, we recommend opting for a more-versatile toaster oven instead.
The Cuisinart CPT-122 2-Slice Compact Plastic Toaster and its four-slot version, the Cuisinart CPT-142 4-Slice Compact Plastic Toaster, both produced some of the finest, most evenly browned bread of all the toasters we tested (this was true in multiple rounds of testing over several years, with more than one of the same model).
The Cuisinart toasters offer a wide range of settings and easy-to-use controls, and they remain cool to the touch batch after batch. But like most modern toasters, they’re prone to quality-control issues and may not last for more than five years, give or take.
That said, the Cuisinarts are covered by a generous three-year warranty (versus the one-year warranty that comes with most other toasters), so you have the option to return yours if you end up getting a lemon.
Best for
This toaster is available in several colors. Its touch-activated display makes it easier to wipe clean than our other picks, which have push buttons on their control panels.
If you want a toaster that’s available in lots of colors, we recommend the Beautiful 2 Slice Toaster with Touch Activated Display. Sold exclusively by Walmart, this toaster offered test performance on a par with that of our long-standing picks, the Cuisinart CPT-122 and the Breville BTA720XL Bit More. It toasted bread evenly from edge to edge and provided more consistent results than much of the competition.
Its touch-activated controls light up when you press the power button, and they go dark when you’re not actively using the toaster. We found its surface easier to wipe down since it doesn’t have any push buttons to trap crumbs and grime.
As we’ve learned from years of researching and testing toasters, models with increased circuitry and digital components may provide more avenues for failure down the road. But considering this toaster’s reasonable price, we expect it to give you your money’s worth, especially if it lasts five to 10 years.
Upgrade pick
This expensive model toasts bread exquisitely. And its design is elegant, so it looks great on a counter. But it still has some of the pitfalls of cheaper toasters, so it may not last long enough to justify its high price.
The stainless steel two-slot Breville BTA720XL Bit More Toaster produced the most consistent toast of any model we tested—golden brown all over with no white patches or lines—even after we made several back-to-back batches.
It also has a toast-saving “A Bit More” button (which allows you to add a little more time to an underdone slice) and a “Lift & Look” lever (which lets you peek at the doneness of your slice without interrupting the toasting cycle).
And while we haven’t experienced this in our own long-term testing, we’ve read some customer reviews that say this model begins toasting unevenly after a year or two of use. Based on our research, we know that paying more doesn’t always translate to better quality. Just keep this in mind when deciding whether to spend more on the Breville toaster.
