My first kitchen job was at a pizza restaurant: I was 19 and working the counter, and I begged the guys making pizza to let me join them. (Shout out to Hot Lips Pizza in Portland, Oregon.) So you can trust me when I say I’m a true pizza nerd.

Twenty years (and many kitchen jobs) later, I’m more focused on home cooking, but I still love making pizza. I made close to 100 pizzas when I was testing ovens for this guide, and, inexplicably, my love for the craft has managed to endure.

I’ve also tested kitchen scales, lunch boxes, kids bikes, and helmets as a freelance writer for Wirecutter.

For this guide:

• I fired up 10 pizza ovens on my back porch and made several pizzas in each one, assessing temperatures, cook times, heat distribution, maneuverability, and other factors.
• I consulted with experts about various pizza styles, as well as each style’s differing oven requirements.
• I made sure to test ovens with various fuel sources (wood, charcoal, pellets, and propane), and I considered the pros and cons of each.
• Like all Wirecutter journalists, I review and test products with complete editorial independence. I’m never made aware of any business implications of my editorial recommendations. Read more about our editorial standards.

This guide also builds on research and testing by Lesley Stockton, one of Wirecutter’s senior staff writers on the kitchen team. Lesley also made close to 100 pizzas (surrounded by deep snow) while writing the original version of this guide. In her decade of restaurant work before joining Wirecutter, she spent two and a half years maintaining the wood-fired grill at a restaurant.

Maybe your family has a weekly pizza night, or maybe you’re hoping to become famous in your neighborhood for your epic pizza parties. Either way, if you’re making pizza on a regular basis, you could probably benefit from a home pizza oven.

While conventional ovens can get up to around 500 °F, most pizzerias employ ovens that get to at least 600 °F and up to around 900 °F. And though you can make a perfectly tasty pizza at 500 °F with a pizza stone or baking steel, the stone will probably take at least an hour to heat up, and it will struggle to stay hot after two or three pizzas. And you may set off your smoke alarm as the accumulating semolina or flour starts to burn.

A home pizza oven, on the other hand, can heat up in less than 30 minutes, and its stone will stay hot, pizza after pizza. And since most of these ovens are meant to be used outside, smoke isn’t usually an issue. Plus, the super-high temperatures will burn off residual flour.

If you decide to invest in a home pizza oven, it’s worth considering a few factors: your budget, your space limitations, and your favorite fuel source. We tested several outdoor, propane-fueled ovens that cost less than $700, and we recommend two of them in this guide.

If your space is limited (think rooftop patios), or you require something that’s easily portable, you might consider an oven that runs on wood pellets. (Propane tanks are pretty big, and they can be a pain to lug around, whereas wood pellets are easy to transport.)

Maybe you can’t resist the romantic allure of a proper wood fire: In this case, it’s worth checking out a multi-fuel option. Most home pizza ovens that use wood can also be converted to use gas for the sake of convenience. But these ovens tend to be more expensive.

Finally, if you’re planning on making pizza exclusively indoors, you’ll want to explore electric pizza ovens. These can reach much higher temperatures than your home oven, though they don’t get as hot as a portable outdoor model—think 750 °F compared with 900 °F. And they take up a considerable amount of counter space.

For our latest round of testing, I essentially opened up an amateur backyard pizzeria, making between eight and 10 12-inch pizzas every day for two weeks.

To ensure consistency, I used the same dough recipe every time (RIP Franny’s), and I made tomato sauce à la Roberta’s, which is just whole canned tomatoes whizzed in a food processor with salt and a splash of olive oil.

I used fresh mozzarella when I was in Neapolitan mode, and I used low-moisture mozzarella for lower-temperature, New York pies. A sleeve of pizza boxes and a text thread with neighbors helped me find homes for the (delicious) by-products of all my testing.

Here are the factors we considered and looked for when firing pie after pie:

Ease and consistency, no matter the fuel type

A propane-fueled oven should be easy to turn on, with a clearly labeled and maneuverable ignition knob. Once the oven is lit, it should be simple to control the temperature. The ignition battery should be simple to find (and to replace, when needed).

Electric ovens should also be easy to operate, and ideally they’ll have the added bonus of helpful pre-set cooking functions.

With wood-fueled ovens, it should be simple to light a fire in the oven and keep it going. (You’ll probably need to tend the fire almost constantly.)

Multi-fuel pizza ovens should be able to reach blistering temperatures no matter their fuel source. And it should be quick and simple to convert from one fuel source to another.

Versatile temperature options

We used an infrared thermometer to track the temperature of each oven’s floor, to note how long it took to reach certain temps, and to identify hot spots during testing.

Neapolitan pizzas rely on super-high temperatures to achieve their signature leopard-spotted crusts. On the cordierite stones that are standard in most pizza ovens, I liked 775 °F to 800 °F for Neapolitan pies (and I learned the hard way that cordierite stones at 950 °F—which many ovens can reach—will result in unpleasantly scorched bottoms).

New York–style pizzas, on the other hand, are better baked at lower temperatures. Joe Beddia, of the nationally beloved Pizzeria Beddia in Philadelphia, told us, “I don’t love pizzas that are cooked hotter than 600 degrees.” (Respectfully, I liked 650 °F for New York–style pies.)

We preferred ovens that could meet the needs of both styles of pizza, and those that could be easily controlled to reach and keep those temperatures. Electric and propane-fueled ovens were by far the easiest to manipulate, temperature-wise. Wood ovens required a bit more mastery, and in the pellet oven I tested, the temperature felt very difficult to control.

Even heat distribution

Whether the flame comes from pellets in a firebox, an L-shaped gas burner, or a wood fire, it will ideally distribute heat evenly across the stone. You’ll have to turn your pizza a few times while it bakes no matter what, but some ovens threaten “blink and you’ll miss it” scorching due to tricky hot spots.

Size of opening and cooking surface

There is a definite learning curve to launching pizzas and rotating them as they cook. Ovens with wider and taller openings will give you more breathing room as you master these skills. A pizza baked in an 800 °F oven will need to be turned every 20 to 30 seconds until it’s done, which usually takes less than two minutes.

Similarly, a larger baking-surface area will allow for more even baking, and it will make it easier to turn the pizza. For this reason, I preferred making 12-inch pizzas in 16-inch (and up) ovens. But keep in mind that larger ovens are pricier.

Ease of cleaning and storing

Since pizza ovens run so hot, they’re essentially self-cleaning. But from time to time, you may need to scrub the stone, which is easier to do if it’s removable. (It happens to the best of us: You may find yourself confronting a pile of dough, cheese, and sauce on the oven floor that resembles something between a calzone and a compost pile.) A pizza oven brush might help (though we didn’t test it).

Bonus points if your pizza oven comes with a cover, which will help protect it from the elements. And most companies sell them, though they’re not always included.

Helpful instruction manual

Because pizza ovens operate at such high heat, and most with live fire, it’s really important to have a strong understanding of how they work. Yes, you’re trying to make great pizza, but you’re also trying to stay safe. Manuals with clear instructions, an approachable layout, and helpful graphics make it easy to assemble, cure, and use your oven. During the initial stages of testing, I really appreciated QR codes that led to instructional videos.

Top pick

Ooni Koda 16 Gas Powered Pizza Oven

A spacious, propane-fueled pizza oven

This portable outdoor pizza oven lights up with the turn of a dial, and it can bake an obscene number of pizzas on one tank of gas.

Buying Options

$600 $480 from Williams Sonoma

You save $120 (20%)

$600 $480 from Sur La Table

You save $120 (20%)

$599 from Amazon

$599 from Lowe's

$599 from Huckberry

The Ooni Koda 16 Gas Powered Pizza Oven is your best bet for plug-and-play pizza nights. It’s easy to turn on, and it can reach Neapolitan-worthy temperatures in about 20 minutes. It’s great at distributing (and retaining) heat, and its spacious stone and roomy opening make launching and turning pizzas a breeze.

It brings the heat. All of the ovens I tested were capable of reaching scorching temperatures, but some did the job much faster than others. At full blast, the Ooni Koda 16 stone reached 850 °F in about 20 minutes. (And it got to 950 °F in 30 minutes—which, for the record, was too hot and delivered scorched bottoms.)

According to Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, Neapolitan pizzas must be cooked with a maximum base temperature of 805 °F (though we had success in the 775 °F to 800 °F range). And New York–style pizzas work best cooked at about 600 °F to 700 °F.

Suffice to say, the Ooni Koda 16 will provide the heat that you need to achieve perfectly (and quickly!) cooked pizzas. With a stone temperature of 750 °F, it cooked pizzas in about one minute 30 seconds.

It’s super-easy to set up. The Ooni Koda 16 arrives ready to go: All I had to do was insert the stone, and hook the oven up to a propane tank. The removable stone makes doing an occasional deep-cleaning easier, too.

To light the oven, make sure the valve on the propane tank is open all the way; then just turn the dial on the oven until you hear it click.

The heat is consistent. One of the main benefits of propane is its reliability. “I like using gas because it's one less variable I have to deal with,” said Betsy English of Quanto Basta in Portland, Maine. In our testing over the years, the Ooni Koda 16 has been able to reach and maintain ideal temperatures in conditions from moderate wind to blankets of snow in the dead of a Brooklyn winter. Pellet-, wood-, and charcoal-fueled ovens, on the other hand, are a lot harder to keep consistently hot.

The Koda 16 also has a unique heat map, due to the L-shaped burner that runs along the oven’s left and rear sides. This meant there were fewer hot spots than in other ovens I tested, which in turn meant fewer growing pains as I got to know the oven.

On average, the cordierite stone lost about 100 degrees of heat after baking a pizza, but it took only five minutes to come back up to its original, ideal temperature.

Ooni states on its website that the Koda 16 burns through 1.3 pounds of propane per hour of use; in my experience, this seems about right. That’s about the same as the three-burner Weber grill we recommend.

It’s just big enough. The oven’s 16¾-by-16¾-inch cooking surface and 21-by-4½-inch opening feel generous and forgiving: I had plenty of space to launch pizzas and then quickly maneuver them while they cooked. And since the opening is more than 4 inches wider than the actual baking surface, I could sneak the pizza peel in from all angles to rapidly turn the blistering pizzas.

As its name suggests, the Ooni Koda 16 can fit a 16-inch pizza. But in an ideal world, I would always make pizza that’s a few inches smaller than my oven’s maximum pizza size. The most common pizza size specified in recipes seems to be 12 inches. And though smaller ovens, like the Solo Pi Prime and Ooni Fyra, can technically fit 12-inch pizzas, it’s a heck of a lot easier to launch, turn, and achieve perfectly browned 12-inch pizzas in the Ooni Koda 16. (The openings on the Ooni Fyra and the Solo Stove are about 3½ inches high, a full inch smaller than the Ooni Koda 16’s opening.)

The Ooni Koda 16’s spaciousness also means you can cook lots of other things in it, like spatchcocked chicken and roasted asparagus.

With that said, I also tested some humongous pizza ovens that were decidedly not portable, and they essentially became permanent fixtures on my back deck (whether I liked it or not). Though the Ooni Koda 16 has a roomy interior, it doesn’t take up a ton of space on an outdoor table (about 25 by 23 inches). And at 40 pounds (not including the propane tank), it could feasibly be brought on tailgating or car-camping outings.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

It doesn’t come with any accessories. Barely any of the ovens that I tested come with accessories (only the Solo Pi Prime comes with a cover). So you’ll need to factor in the cost of a cover, an infrared thermometer, a wooden peel for launching the pizza, a metal peel for retrieving it, and the initial purchase of a tank of propane (currently around $70). The costs can add up, and even a single included accessory would lighten the load in a meaningful way. At least Ooni’s five-year warranty helps justify the cost.

There’s no ambient thermometer. Many of the higher-end ovens I tested came equipped with digital thermometers that read ambient temperature, and they were helpful as I was getting to know the ovens during testing. The Ooni Koda 16 doesn’t have one, so I had to rely exclusively on an infrared thermometer to make sure I wasn’t setting myself up for failure with a too-hot (or too-cool) oven.

I wish the ignition knob were on the front. This is a small detail, but I found it a little inconvenient that the ignition knob was on the side of the oven. The Ooni Koda 12 was even worse, with the knob all the way in the back. Our other picks have ignition knobs that are easily accessible on or near the front of the oven.

Budget pick

Solo Stove Pi Prime Propane Pizza Oven

Smaller, less expensive

You get a lot of bang for your buck with this compact, propane-fueled pizza oven. It’s best for smaller pizzas, but it can make a lot of them in quick succession.

Buying Options

$350 from Dick's Sporting Goods

$330 from Best Buy

The propane-fueled Solo Stove Pi Prime Pizza Oven does a great job of making beautifully bubbly and browned pizzas at crucially high temperatures, in record time. It’s one of the more petite models I tested, so there’s a little less wiggle room for launching and turning pizzas. But what this oven lacks in space, it more than makes up for in savings.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a better deal in the world of home pizza ovens—this model currently costs $350. And, even better, that price includes a cover and a lifetime warranty.

It quickly reaches critical temperatures. During my tests, this oven wasn’t quite as fast as our top pick, but the Solo Stove Pi Prime still got up to 850 °F in less than 30 minutes—more than hot enough to make a beautiful pizza. And just like the Ooni Koda 16, our top pick, this oven lost about 100 degrees after each pizza, but it regained those degrees in about five minutes.

It cooked most pizzas in under two minutes, and I found that heat was well distributed, as long as I didn’t accidentally launch the pizza too far back and bump the dough up against the burner.

It’s easy to set up. It arrived essentially ready to go. As with our top pick, with this oven, you just have to take it out of the box, insert the stone, and connect it to a propane tank. The removable stone makes occasional deep cleaning easier, which is a nice bonus. The manual has lots of helpful graphics, too.

It’s easy to light, with a conveniently located ignition knob. Also like our top pick, the Solo Stove Pi Prime Oven ignites easily with the turn of a knob. But even better than the Koda’s, the Solo’s knob is helpfully located in the front of the oven, instead of on the side.

I also really appreciated the knob’s little red markers, which signaled the proper temperature for pizza. There was less of a learning curve as I got to know the oven, because those markers suggested the ideal setting—and I found that they were spot-on.

It’s petite and portable. With a diameter of 20 inches and a weight of about 30 pounds, the Solo Stove Pi Prime is definitely small enough to easily accompany you on a weekend adventure. And if you’re tight on space, this oven, with its round shape, may fit more easily on a small table on a crowded porch than our top pick. (Keep in mind, though, that pizza ovens need to be placed on non-combustible surfaces. And the propane tank will take up a decent amount of space, too.)

The tradeoff is that the baking surface is a little cramped. Though the baking surface can technically fit a 13-inch pizza, you’re probably better off with a 12-inch pizza, since it’s nice to have the extra inch for easier maneuvering. And even then I felt the lack of spaciousness, compared with our top pick. It was trickier to turn the pizza with less wiggle room, and a few times I bumped the dough up against the burner at the rear of the oven. It didn’t stick too terribly, but it did scorch immediately.

The opening is small, too. Compared with the Ooni Koda 16, which has a roomy, 21-by-4½-inch opening, the Solo Stove Pi Prime has a 13-by-3½-inch opening. Just as with the smaller baking surface, this smaller opening makes maneuvering a pizza harder, and it also means you’re more limited as to what else you can do in the oven. You might roast a small spatchcocked chicken in the Ooni Koda 16, for example, but it’s definitely not happening in a Solo Stove Pi Prime.

But it’s a great deal. When it comes to propane-fueled portable home pizza ovens, I don’t think there’s one that provides better bang for your buck on the market. The Pi Prime costs about $50 less than the Ooni Koda 12, which has an even smaller baking surface.

Plus it comes with a cover, whereas you’d have to shell out an extra $20 to $40 to cover the Ooni Koda 12.

Upgrade pick

Gozney Dome

An ultraluxe, multi-fuel oven

The Gozney Dome, which can be fueled by propane or wood, provides precision, versatility, and a really good time for novice pizza makers and seasoned home cooks alike.

Buying Options

$1,999 from Home Depot

$1,800 from Gozney

If you’re an experienced pizza enthusiast who loves the romance of a wood fire, the ultra-luxe Gozney Dome could be a worthwhile investment. It’s multi-fuel, so it offers the convenience of propane for those busy weeknights, as well as the option to build a wood fire and luxuriate in the centuries-old rhythm of pizza making.

The built-in digital thermometer and many optional add-on accessories are designed to support some pretty major endeavors—think sourdough bread, slow-roasted pork shoulder, and fire-roasted vegetables. But it’s expensive—especially if you’re tempted by all those extras.

It gets incredibly hot. During testing, I tried the Gozney Dome with propane first. While the bigger, thicker stone took longer to heat up than the smaller ovens I tested (about 45 minutes to reach 850 °F), once things were going, the stone retained heat very well, and I was impressed by the burner’s ability to send rolling flames arcing along the top of the dome.

With a stone temperature of around 800 °F, the pizzas cooked in about a minute. And just like our top pick, this oven lost about 100 degrees of heat after each pizza, but it regained those degrees within about five minutes. The Dome is more heavily insulated than our other picks, which helps with heat retention.

It's spacious. Just like the Ooni Koda 16, the Dome can fit up to a 16-inch pizza, though we prefer making 12-inch pizzas in it. Even with a sizable wood fire burning on one side of the oven, there was still plenty of space to easily maneuver pizzas. The oven opening is 4.7 inches high by 16.1 inches wide, which is a lot narrower than the Koda 16's uniquely wide opening. But inside the oven, there's more head height, which was helpful for baking endeavors that involved a cast iron pan.

It works with wood fire. The Gozney Dome really stood out when I lit a wood fire in it. I loved building the fire right on the floor of the oven and tending it as I made pizzas. (But I didn’t love the price of the hardwood kindling it required.)

You need to feed the fire frequently, so there’s a continual arc of flame rolling along the top of the dome. But I found this version of fire-tending much more intuitive than that of the Ooni Karu 12 and its rear-loading firebox.

The wood fire resulted in a stone temperature of around 750 °F, while the ambient temperature was closer to 900 °F (according to the Dome’s digital thermometer). This combination is closely aligned with the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana’s oven temperature regulations, which may have explained why the pizzas I made with wood fire were especially gorgeous.

Plus, though it won’t have a strong effect on your pizza’s flavor, the wood smoke sparks a sensory pleasure that is, frankly, written in our DNA.

Gozney sells a wood loader for around $50. But I found that a long (and inexpensive) pair of stainless steel kitchen tongs worked better for maneuvering wood.

It’s easily convertible. The system that Gozney created for switching fuel sources is virtually effortless. The oven’s gas burner is located on the oven floor’s left side, and an ash chute resides on the right. When the gas burner is in use, a stone puck covers the ash chute, and a metal burner guard goes over the gas side to keep food from sliding into the burner.

To switch to burning wood, you remove the metal burner guard on the left, and insert the stone puck over the burner. Then you place a perforated metal tray over the ash chute, over which your fire resides.

I once ran out of propane while using the Gozney Dome, but since several balls of pizza dough were side-eyeing me from my prep table, I decided to quickly convert it to wood-burning mode, because I knew it would be easy. But it did require heat-proof gloves, a few kitchen tools, and an unhealthy level of confidence. Don’t try this at home, folks.

It’s versatile. The Gozney Dome is built for the serious home cook who likes to take on a wide variety of kitchen projects. I roasted squid in a cast-iron pan when I had a wood fire going, and I was delighted by the charred-yet-tender results. But there’s a learning curve and a mystique when cooking with fire: For example, why did the outside of my well-seasoned cast-iron pan catch on fire?

To take advantage of the Gozney Dome’s fullest potential, you may want to invest in accessories like a steam injector for bread baking or a rope-sealed door for slow roasting. But we have yet to test these add-ons, and they’re expensive.

It has a built-in thermometer. The ability to measure ambient temperature was really helpful at times, and the Gozney Dome is the only one of our picks that can do this. We also tested the Ooni Koda Max, which features a similar thermometer (and both ovens also come with optional probe thermometers). But the Koda Max uses propane only, and it doesn’t deliver the same kind of romance as the Dome.

It’s expensive—and you’ll likely still spend on extras. With a starting price of about $2,000, and a long list of irresistible add-ons (I think the $80 cover is non-negotiable), the Gozney Dome is no small investment. But shipping is free, and the five-year warranty helps.

Another expense will be hardwood kindling, if you choose to use wood; regular logs won’t fit, and it’s nearly impossible to make your own bespoke hardwood kindling, unless you work in a wood shop. Most kindling sold in hardware stores is softwood like pine, which doesn’t work for ovens. Gozney sells hardwood, as do other pizza oven companies, but it’s pricey: Gozney states that you’ll use around 7.5 pounds of wood per session, which costs around $15.

Factor in getting a table, too, because this oven is big, and it’s not portable. The Gozney Dome weighs a whopping 128 pounds, and during testing, I needed an extra person to help lift it out of its box and onto a metal prep table. But it arrived virtually assembled, just like our top and budget picks.

You’ll need a relatively large—and very sturdy—non-combustible surface for the Dome to rest on, and you probably won’t want to move it very frequently. Gozney sells a stand for the Dome, but it’s remarkably expensive (around $350). I’m partial to stainless steel restaurant-style prep tables.

If you buy the Gozney Dome, plan on assigning it a designated location, and buy the cover so you don’t have to worry about exposure to the elements. Luckily, it’s attractive enough to merit permanent placement on a back deck.

The stone isn’t removable. Unlike with all of our other picks, with the Gozney Dome you can’t remove the stone to clean it, but this isn’t a big deal. Ovens are essentially self-cleaning because they burn so hot.

Best for

Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo

An indoor countertop pizza oven

This oven fully preheats in 15 minutes, and it can cook a pizza in just over 90 seconds. It’s the Ferrari of countertop ovens: sleek, expensive, and fast.

Buying Options

$800 from Amazon

$800 from Best Buy

If you don’t have the outdoor space for a portable pizza oven, the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo bakes pizzas just as well as our other picks, and it does so from your kitchen countertop. Thanks to pre-programmed functions, this oven takes most of the guesswork out of baking the perfect pie. And since it runs on electricity—not on propane, wood, or wood pellets, as our outdoor picks do—you can crank out as many pizzas as you want, without fearing that you’ll run out of fuel. But this oven is an expensive single-purpose appliance.

It doesn’t get as hot as our other picks, but that’s okay. This pizza oven tops out at 750 °F; that’s about 200 degrees cooler than the highest temperatures we measured in the Ooni Koda 16, the Solo Stove Pi Prime, and the Gozney Dome models.

That said, the Pizzaiolo bakes up a pretty perfect pizza, and it takes only 15 minutes to preheat. That’s roughly half the time it took our outdoor picks to come up to temperature (depending on weather conditions).

Using this oven’s presets, you can easily bake almost any style of pizza. It comes pre-programmed with settings that automatically set the time and temperature for frozen, pan, New York, thin and crispy, and “wood-fired” (Neapolitan) pizzas. In our tests, we found the settings to be well calibrated, requiring little to no tinkering.

We also like that the Pizzaiolo model includes a seasoned carbon-steel pan for making deep-dish pizzas, thus eliminating the hassle of finding one that fits the cramped oven cavity.

There’s also a manual mode. This is a great option for people who like to have complete control. When the oven is in manual mode, you determine the deck and top temperatures and the cooking time. It also has a dial that lets you control the level of char on the top crust.

But this oven isn’t as versatile as our other picks. The small oven cavity is the perfect size for baking a 12-inch pizza and little else, other than flatbreads like pita and naan. If we’re wary of cooking a fatty piece of meat in a portable outdoor pizza oven, we wouldn’t even attempt that in the Pizzaiolo oven, due to its tendency to emit considerable amounts of smoke at high temperatures. When we ran our tests in 2019, the Pizzaiolo oven set off the smoke alarm twice.

Professional pizza chefs love it, though. A recent flood of pop-up pizza joints in New York City showed the world what portable ovens are capable of. And the Breville Pizzaiolo was in heavy rotation, beloved by cooks for its reliability, portable size, and ability to be used safely indoors.

It’s expensive, but the price has come down. Historically, the price has fluctuated between $800 and $1,000. But at the time of publication, this oven’s price has stayed around $800 for several months, so we wouldn’t recommend paying more than that. It might get even cheaper on sale.

That’s still very pricey, and for the price, we wish the warranty were longer than two years. But this model might be worth it if you love making pizza and don’t have any outdoor space.

If you need maximum portability: The Ooni Fyra 12 is a petite, lightweight wood-pellet-fueled oven that works well for small spaces. (Keep in mind that you will need to allow for space directly behind the oven, because flames can shoot out the back when you open the door.)

The Fyra 12 can reach the same blistering temperatures as our picks, and just as quickly. At 22 pounds, it’s the second lightest oven we’ve tested, and the fuel it requires—a 10 pound bag of hardwood pellets—is relatively easy to carry. Meanwhile, the Ooni Koda 12, which weighs 1.5 pounds less than the Fyra, will still require a 30-pound propane tank.

The Fyra 12’s opening is an inch shorter than the opening on the Ooni Koda 16. This makes launching and turning pizzas a little more technically challenging. And there’s a learning curve to keeping the hopper flowing with pellets—you want to keep the fire going consistently, but you also don’t want to overload the hopper, which can lead to jams.

The Ooni Fyra 12 is also inexpensive. It costs around $350, the same as our budget pick, but it’s frequently on sale. Overall, it’s a great choice that costs and weighs less.

If you’re a die-hard Neapolitan fanatic: The propane-fueled Fontana Maestro 60 is very elegant, easy to use, and—if you buy Fontana’s upgrade Saputo Biscotto stones—it’s capable of making seriously high-quality Neapolitan-style pizza in around 50 seconds.

It’s also heavy, expensive, and not as versatile as our upgrade pick.

But those stones! It’s the “unique mineral content of the alluvial clay” that’s responsible for their ability to cook pizza at incredibly high temperatures (think 900 °F and up) without scorching the bottom of the pizza, according to Fontana’s website. Pizza after pizza in the Maestro 60 sported the same beautiful, leopard-spotted bottom. By contrast, I experienced quite a few scorched bottoms with the other ovens, due to too-high temperatures or careless turning.

You can buy the same type of stone to upgrade your Ooni Koda 16, but it arrives from Italy about two weeks after ordering, packed in a ridiculous amount of crumbly styrofoam. Its thickness also decreases the head space in the Koda, so we’re not sure the $150 upgrade is worth it.

The Maestro 60 currently costs $1,900, plus a $200 shipping fee—and if you want the upgrade stones (which are the main reason to buy it, in my opinion), you’ll have to pay another $300. Plus it gets delivered on a wood pallet, and, just like our upgrade pick, it’s not particularly portable. Unlike our upgrade pick, it runs only on propane. But it looks and feels special, almost like a built-in oven, and it turns out really gorgeous, Neapolitan-style pizzas.

Although pizza ovens are meant for outdoor use, they’re not impervious to the elements. If possible, store your oven in a garage or shed. And if you don’t have that kind of space (or you buy a bigger, less-portable oven), buy a dedicated cover (or wrap it in a tarp).

Clean in and around the pizza stone occasionally. Remove the stone if possible, wipe it down with a dry rag, and then brush or wipe away all of the stray bits at the bottom of the oven.

After a really fun round of testing propane, pellet, and dual-fuel pizza ovens in September 2024, we’re planning on turning our attention to electric options. We’ll be testing the Cuisinart Indoor Pizza Oven against our current pick, the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo. It makes the same-size pizzas (12 inches maximum) but only reaches 700 °F, compared with Breville’s 750 °F. But at $300 it’s a fraction of the cost of the Pizzaiolo. And like the Breville, the Cuisinart comes with a similar array of accessories, such as a deep-dish pizza pan and a peel.

The Ninja Woodfire 8-in-1 Outdoor Oven is also intriguing. Though it can’t be used indoors, like the Breville or Cuisinart pizza ovens, it has a lot of versatility. In addition to making pizzas at 700 °F, it can be used as a smoker, roaster, dehydrator, or warming drawer (among other purported functions). You can add wood pellets to it for smoky flavor, and it comes with a number of other accessories, like a high heat pan and a roasting rack.

We tested the Ooni Koda 12 because we were looking for an inexpensive and portable propane budget option. But while it gets just as hot as the Ooni Koda 16, its small opening is harder to work with, and it doesn't distribute heat as evenly as our budget pick. Plus the ignition knob is located on the rear of the oven, which is inconvenient.

There’s plenty to like about the Ooni Koda Max. It has the largest cooking area of any of the ovens we tested, and two independently controlled temperature zones allow for unique flexibility. And it costs several hundred dollars less than our upgrade pick, the Gozney Dome. But for something so expensive, and something that takes up so much space on a back porch or patio (and is essentially not portable), we wish it were more attractive and that it could burn wood like the Dome.

The Ooni Karu 12 Multi-Fuel Pizza Oven runs on hardwood kindling and lump charcoal (either independently or combined), and for another $99, you can buy a gas burner attachment for it. The firebox on the Karu 12 measures 9⅜ by 6 inches and requires wood that’s been cut specifically to fit—6 by 2 inches is ideal. Charcoal is easier both to light and to fit into the firebox.

While testing it with wood, we found that once the oven got up to temperature, we could bake two pizzas before we had to add more fuel. And when we tested it with the gas burner, there were more hot spots than we’d like.

We hoped the Ooni Volt 12 Electric Pizza Oven would be a solid alternative to the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo. But it fell short in a few ways. The main issue was temperature control. When we were baking pizzas back to back, all of a sudden the third or fourth pizza would come out completely scorched on the bottom, and we hadn’t changed any settings. The oven is also very big, measuring 17½ by 21 inches, so you’d need to have a large slab of countertop space to use it in your kitchen. Lastly, the Volt 12 has no preset functions, so it’s less user-friendly than the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo for the same price.

The Gozney Arc is a solid oven, with the same unique propane flame as the Gozney Dome that gently rolls (in an arc) over the dome of the oven. We have no qualms with the quality of pizza it turned out, but it’s not as spacious or convenient as our top pick, the Ooni Koda 16, and it costs about $100 more.

The Gozney Roccbox isn’t a pick for a few reasons, one of them being that it’s a 12-inch oven, yet it costs as much as the Ooni Koda 16. At 12¼ by 3¼ inches, the Roccbox’s opening is also the smallest of those on all of the ovens we tested, and that made rotating a pizza mid-bake more difficult. Plus, the Roccbox's cordierite baking stone isn’t removable for cleaning. We also tested Gozney’s wood-burner accessory for the Roccbox (sold separately, for $100), but even after an hour and a half of constantly feeding the fire with hardwood, the stone never exceeded 400 °F. Maybe it’s because we tested it during the cold winter months, but we didn’t have that issue with the wood-fired Ooni Karu 12.

We wanted to try the Solo Stove Pi Fire because we’re big fans of the Solo Stove Bonfire 2.0. And it’s a cool idea: Get a ripping fire going in your fire pit; then plunk the Pi Fire over top for an instant pizza night. Though the stone did get to a respectable 650 °F, we found there just wasn’t enough ambient heat to properly brown the top of the pizza. Plus, the largest version, the Yukon, costs nearly as much as our budget pick, the Solo Stove Pi Prime. We’d rather spend our money on a dedicated pizza oven that will turn out truly great pizza.

This article was edited by Marilyn Ong and Marguerite Preston.