The Best Vegan Butter

Top pick

Melt Organic Cold Pressed Plant Butter

The best vegan butter

This simple vegan butter has a mellow flavor, a nice salt level, and a silky texture.

Buying Options

$8 from Instacart

Melt Organic Cold Pressed Plant Butter is a smooth-textured, relatively neutral-tasting, allergen-free vegan butter. Most vegan butters we tasted were plagued by the same flavor and texture problems—bitter, acrid tastes and a loose and greasy or brittle and grainy consistency. The Melt spread is not a perfect butter alternative—it won’t fool anyone into thinking it’s dairy—but its milder, simpler flavor won us over.

The Melt spread is sweet and slightly salty, and it has a more restrained level of faux butter flavor than most of the vegan butters we tasted. Some testers noted a slight smokiness and fishiness but still said it was one of the best-tasting of the bunch.

Out of the fridge, the Melt vegan butter had a silky, smooth texture that we enjoyed spreading on bread. Tasters said it was light, whereas other vegan butters were greasy and weighed down a bite of bread. But at room temperature, this butter was a little loose, with some tasters likening it to spreading sunscreen on bread. That looseness also contributed to frosting with the texture of cake batter and sugar cookies that spread a bit too much. But in flavor and texture, the resulting cookies were some of our favorites.

Top pick

Trader Joe’s Organic Buttery Plant-Based Spread

The best vegan butter, this time at TJ’s

Very similar to the Melt spread but for half the price, this plant-based spread also has a winning combination of silky smoothness, slightly salty sweetness, and as little vegetal twang as possible.

Buying Options

$4 from Trader Joe's

In our brand-concealed taste test, tasters detected similarities between Trader Joe’s Organic Buttery Plant-Based Spread (not to be confused with Trader Joe’s Dairy Free Buttery Spread, which comes in a block rather than a tub) and Melt Organic Cold Pressed Plant Butter, and we later noticed that the two have similar, though not entirely identical, ingredient lists. But at $4 for 13 ounces, this Trader Joe’s vegan butter costs about half as much as the Melt spread.

Like the Melt vegan butter, Trader Joe’s Organic Buttery Plant-Based Spread had only very light artificial popcorn-butter aftertaste and a saltiness that tasters found compelling and moreish. A couple of tasters picked out a slight smokiness or a vegetal aroma, while other tasters noted a sweet, slightly nutty, cookie-dough flavor.

Across the board, tasters said that this vegan butter was much more tolerable than others we tasted, with one remarking that they could see the butter disappearing readily into the background of a dish. Sometimes the best thing vegan butter can do is disappear.

Like the Melt vegan butter, this Trader Joe’s spread was smooth and spreadable out of the fridge, though not as dense and creamy as dairy butter. At room temperature, the Trader Joe’s spread was plagued by the same texture issues as the Melt spread, with a loose consistency not unlike mayonnaise or lotion. This vegan butter won’t produce stiff-peaked frosting or tall cookies, but it will spread onto a slice of bread without raising any eyebrows.

If you want the best butter substitute, regardless of the price (and if you can find it in stores near you): Monty’s Original Pure Plant-Based Cloud Butter is an impressive, high-end vegan butter. It has a somewhat cheesy dairy flavor and a rich, creamy texture. It won out in our sugar-cookies baking test—cookies we made with the Monty’s spread held some of their shape and maintained a chewy, slightly underdone center evocative of Levain-style cookies, while every other cookie spread thin and flat. If we could get an unlimited supply of any of these vegan butters, we would pick Monty’s. But this vegan butter is the most expensive we’ve tasted (about $13 for 5 ounces at this writing), and we can’t imagine splurging on it regularly. Plus, the Monty’s spread might not be easy to find in your area, and online orders have been sold out for over a month at this writing.

If you want a palm-oil-free option: Most tasters found Wayfare Dairy Free Salted & Whipped Butter to be sweet, slightly salty, and mild, free of the artificial butter flavor that overpowered other options, though vegetal in flavor. Our panel unanimously deemed its appearance challenging—the thick, grayish spread reminded multiple tasters of plaster. This vegan butter looks and tastes plant-based. But it spread well on bread, it was smooth, and it was palatable enough for most tasters.

If you’re making frosting or you want to know which of the widely available Country Crock spreads is the best: We preferred Country Crock Plant Butter with Olive Oil to the company’s avocado-oil option. Though the two were similar, the base flavor of the olive-oil spread did more to meld with the strong faux butter flavor that both options have. (The olive oil spread comes in sticks, too.)

The Country Crock olive-oil vegan butter was one of the easiest vegan butters for us to bake with, mixing and creaming more similarly to dairy butter than other options, though the cookies still had too much spread. It shone in our frosting test, yielding results with a texture somewhere between that of fluffy canned frosting and actually decent buttercream. And the flavor was fine, with no lingering offness that could ruin a cake.

On bread, the spread was grainy and a little oily but easily spreadable. On its own, it had a slightly sweet, baked-goods flavor, as if it already contained flour and sugar, so it was not our favorite option when we ate it with bread.

We didn’t hate Country Crock Plant Butter with Avocado Oil or its stick version, but we found it a bit gritty and overpowered by a potent faux butter flavor. Most tasters preferred Country Crock Plant Butter with Olive Oil.

One taster remarked that stuff like Earth Balance Original Buttery Spread gives all nondairy and vegan food a bad name. The rancid-oil flavor reminded us of eating a crayon or a slightly fishy lotion.

Earth Balance Soy Free Buttery Spread was our favorite among Earth Balance’s offerings, but it was still tinged with the bitter, vegetal flavor of vegetable oil, which came through in cookies and frosting.

Fresh out of the fridge, Miyoko’s Creamery Salted Oat Milk Butter was spreadable but gritty and had a plasticky flavor. At room temperature, it separated into an inedible mixture of greenish oil and sickly goo.

Miyoko’s Creamery Salted Plant Milk Butter was crumbly and bland at best, with hints of plastic-wrapped, freezer-burned vegan ice cream or rancid coconut.

Smart Balance Original Buttery Spread was firmer and smoother than many of the vegan butters we tasted, but the flavor was polarizing. For some tasters it evoked cultured butter or nostalgic, old-school margarine, while others thought it tasted of scallops and imitation crab. It made off-tasting cookies and frosting. But if you just want a widely available, margarine-like spread, it could do the trick.

Trader Joe’s Dairy Free Buttery Spread is almost identical in appearance and ingredients to the Violife spread we tested. Tasters found it slightly funky and overly fake-tasting.

Violife Salted Plant Butter had a bland, oat-y flavor and a slightly acrid aftertaste. Some tasters found the blandness a relief in comparison with more flagrantly unpalatable options—and it contains no palm oil, if you’re looking for another palm-oil-free option.

Each vegan butter maker uses a different formula to turn vegan oils into something that evokes churned cream butter. Most contain some blend of oils, from sources such as sunflower, soybean, palm, flaxseed, and canola. Some makers also use ingredients such as butter beans, cashews, or oats to try to add body for a creamy texture.

Vegan butters often also contain some amount of water, plus homogenizing or thickening agents like sunflower lecithin. In reading ingredient lists, we found that most vegan butters also contained some sort of unspecified “flavor,” with some vegan butters smacking of artificial popcorn-butter essence.

We tended to prefer salted options, even for baking—unsalted versions of spreads tended to have stronger off-flavors, especially industrial or plasticky tastes. Salt seems to help these spreads’ ingredients taste more like, well, food.

The ingredient lists of vegan butter can be hard to decipher and distinguish between. Across brands, or even different options within one brand’s line, many vegan butters seem to have nearly identical ingredients, in subtly different orders. As with vegan ice cream, if you notice that you like a certain vegan butter, it could help to check what its most prominent ingredients are, so you can try other vegan butters that are made with similar bases.

Many vegan butters available today contain palm oil. The production of palm oil is notoriously associated with environmental harm, including deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and harmful monoculture. Some brands, such as the maker of our top pick, Melt, say that their palm oil is from “sustainable ethical palm fruit” certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), though some RSPO-certified companies have faced criticism for reported human-rights violations.

If you prefer to avoid palm oil, we have two palm-free options that are worth considering. If you are eating a vegan diet or eating less meat and dairy, you might also consider that you are lessening your participation in the meat and dairy farming industry, which has its own significant environmental impacts, and trading off that footprint for those of ingredients like palm.

I’m lactose-intolerant, and I’ve been baking with and eating non-dairy butter for around eight years. I also wrote Wirecutter’s guide to the best vegan ice cream, and I tested vegan ice cream recipes while working on our guide to the best ice cream maker, so I’m well-versed in the vicissitudes of vegan dairy.

To determine what to test, I read up on vegan butter discourse and compiled a list of promising options that were relatively widely available in stores or for purchase online.

We aimed to include butters across a range of prices and as many options as possible that are free of common allergens and free of palm oil. We ruled out vegan butters that have water as their first ingredient, because those are not great for cooking or baking due to their lower fat content.

In a first round of brand-concealed tasting, a panel of tasters tried 12 different vegan butters. We ate each butter on its own off the spoon, spread on soft and mild potato bread, and spread on crusty sourdough. We did this round of tasting twice: once with cold butter from the fridge and once with room-temperature butter. We took note of how each butter changed as it melted, flagging any that separated or liquified.

Next, I baked sugar cookies with our favorites from the first round of testing, and we compared the appearance, texture, and flavor of the sugar cookies in another brand-concealed tasting. We took note of which cookies had too much spread, and which ones maintained a chewy interior more akin to that of dairy-butter cookies. We hoped for a pleasant buttery flavor but were satisfied in the end by any cookie free of the bitter, industrial flavors that can mar dairy-free baked goods.

Finally, I made a simple buttercream frosting with the vegan butters from the baking round. We tasted the frosting on its own and on yellow sheet cake. We wanted a frosting with stiff peaks, a fluffy, smooth texture, no acrid or vegetal flavors, and enough longevity to remain on a cake at room temperature without wilting.

This article was edited by Marguerite Preston and Marilyn Ong.