The 4 Best Sous Vide Machines Are Accurate, Fast, and Fun to Use

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Immersion circulators—also known as sous vide machines—used to be reserved for professional chefs in fancy kitchens. But what was once only for fine dining is now commonplace in home kitchens. And why not? The best immersion circulators take the guesswork out of cooking because they hold a water bath at a consistent, accurate temperature. That means you don’t need to worry if your grill, stovetop, or oven is too hot or cold: Just let the machine do the work and enjoy perfectly cooked, flavorful food. (Okay, you will probably also want to sear it after.)

Such a techy piece of kitchen gear requires scrutiny. Sous vide machines that can’t hold a temperature are frustrating and unsafe to use. And they’ve got to be user-friendly and versatile. We tested 22 immersion circulators, and yes, it took a whole lotta vacuum-sealed bags. We came away with four outstanding models we recommend for everyone, whether they’re a pro or a home cook.

The Tests

• Water Bath Test: Sous vide cooking happens in a water bath, so the best immersion circulators have to heat up water fast and keep it at a consistent temperature. We started by testing how long each sous vide machine took to bring a gallon of cold water at 57°F to the temperature commonly used for cooking vegetables sous vide: 190°F. Once the circulators brought the water up to the target temperature (not all of them could do this), we held them at that temperature for one hour. We also did this with room-temperature water, which likely more closely replicates a home cook’s experience.
• Chicken Breast Test: We used all the previously successful sous vide machines to cook boneless, skinless chicken breasts at 150°F for one hour. Instant-read thermometers helped us track how fast the circulators heated water to our chosen temperatures and kept their internal thermometers honest.
• Soft-Cooked Egg Test: Chicken breasts taste the same if you cook them with an immersion circulator for two hours or four. Eggs don’t have that same luxury. So to test the circulators’ ability to handle time-sensitive foods, we set water baths to 167°F and cooked the eggs for exactly 12 minutes. The best immersion circulators could recover their target temperatures quickly after the eggs were added, because every second was crucial.
• Cooking Vessel Test: Immersion circulators should work in a variety of cooking vessels, like stockpots and Dutch ovens. We tested our favorite sous vide machines with both to see if they could stand up straight without needing to be tilted. (That could invite water past their max submersion lines.)
• Salmon Test: Three of our winners were app-compatible. We used them to cook salmon fillets in a water bath set to 130ºF, setting up and monitoring the process through the apps, and using the apps’ proprietary recipes when available. We noted how easy they were to navigate, how effective the alerts were, and whether the apps accurately represented the water’s temperature. Again, we used an instant-read thermometer to double-check this. Once the salmon was cooked and removed from the water bath, we added two cups of ice and observed whether the app alerted us to temperature changes.

What We Learned

How a Sous Vide Machine Works

Immersion circulators are designed to heat a water bath to a precise, prescribed temperature and then to maintain that temperature throughout the time it takes to cook the food submerged in the bath. To do that job, an immersion circulator draws water from the bath, bringing it into contact with a heating element on the device. That water is heated by the element and returned to the water bath.

The heating element is turned on and off via a thermostatic control as it brings the water bath up to the target temperature. The device must constantly circulate water for even and accurate temperature control. Without that circulation, water baths develop hot spots (close to where the device is placed) and cold spots.

Temperature accuracy is the defining characteristic of sous vide cooking, giving us complete control over the doneness of the food we're cooking. Most of us are familiar with the benefits of this method of cooking—steaks cooked to a perfect medium-rare from edge to edge, Thanksgiving turkey breast that doesn't turn to sawdust in your mouth, and so on. Immersion circulators that aren't accurate are pretty useless. With that in mind, the ability to maintain a target temperature over an extended period is the most important feature of a sous vide machine.

On top of this necessity, we want immersion circulators with intuitive controls and a user-friendly interface also. They should be compatible with a number of different vessels, operate quietly, and not take up a lot of room.

Not All of the Immersion Circulators Were Accurate

The Breville Joule Turbo and Anova Precision Cooker Pro, blew away the competition in terms of accuracy, nailing their target temperatures quickly.

Other immersion circulators were unable to reach and maintain the target temperature. Others showed inaccurate temperatures, claiming that the water baths were at the prescribed temperature even though they hovered a couple of degrees below or above it. All of the circulators we tested claimed temperature variance of less than 1°F (0.55°C). While a difference of two degrees isn't typically going to mean a ruined meal, sous vide cooking is all about accuracy and precision, so any device that fails at this isn't worth the money. And sometimes, such fiddly numbers do make a difference in the food’s quality. When we cooked eggs, the Anova Nano performed the worst, running a full degree higher than the target temperature; it hit 167°F only momentarily during the recovery window before going back to an undesirable 168°F (75.5°C). This resulted in the yolks of the eggs being more set and fudgy than we wanted.

Speed Was a Nice-to-Have Feature

The Breville Joule Turbo, with 1100 watts, and the Anova Precision Cooker Pro (1200 watts) also heated water fast, reaching their target temperatures in 22 and 32 minutes, respectively. Some of the immersion circulators we tested took over an hour to reach their target temperatures. The Precision Cooker 3.0 took close to 60 minutes. That’s not a deal-breaker, because there was a lot we did like about it. But it is frustrating and potentially a sign of poor quality. The Inkbird Precision Sous Vide Cooker, for example, was painfully slow to heat and struggled to maintain its target temperature. Remember that the material, shape, and size of your cooking vessel will affect the heating time. A smaller amount of water will heat up faster than a giant stockpot of it.

The Best Immersion Circulators Were Easy to Use

During our chicken breast tests, we used the timer function to assess how easy (or not!) the machines were to set up. The Joule must be operated through its app, and while we don't love having to use our smartphones in the kitchen, it is very well designed. Setting the temperature and a timer with it is intuitive. If you enable notifications on your phone, you'll get pinged when your water bath reaches the desired temperature. The app will also prompt you to start the timer  when the food is submerged.

If you’re not totally sold on a techy sous vide machine, you’ll probably like the Anova series. The Precision Cooker 3.0, Precision Cooker Pro, and Nano all work with an information-rich app and can be operated entirely from the onboard display, which has big numbers and a high-contrast screen. But don’t think that just because an immersion circulator has an onboard display, it’s easy to use! We struggled to set and change the temperature, use the timer, and turn off the Monoprice Sous Vide Immersion Cooker, which doesn’t have a compatible app.

Remember above, when we explained that water has to circulate around the vessel to avoid hot and cold spots? Well, some models had such weak motors that it was hard to tell if they were running, and they couldn’t effectively circulate a gallon of water. On the other end of the spectrum, a couple of circulators made an annoying amount of noise and were consequently removed from consideration. The All-Clad Sous Vide, for example, made an impossible-to-ignore whirring sound. Another surprising offender was the Breville PolyScience HydroPro Sous Vide. It’s powerful, boasting 1450 watts, and we thought it yielded great results. But it’s too pricey, too big, and too complicated to use. Sous vide cooking happens over a long period, and an immersion circulator that is too complex or unpleasant to use isn’t one you’re likely to reach for. 

Timing Was Key (and Sous Vide Machines Should Not Automatically Shut Off!)

A more frustrating and significant complaint regarding timers can be levied at both Anova’s products, which can be set in five-minute increments, and the 800-watt Instant Pot Accu Slim (a sous vide machine we otherwise like). We wanted to cook chicken breasts for one hour at 150°F, so we set timers on both the Anova Nano and the Accu Slim when we started heating their water baths. Both timers began counting down as soon as their respective water baths reached the temperature, even though we hadn't added chicken to the baths yet or pressed any button indicating that we wanted to start the countdown.

It seems silly to expect people to be waiting by their circulators, poised to drop their sous vide bags into the water exactly at the moment the bath is at the right temperature. Neither machine gave much of an audible notice that the water bath was ready or that the timer had begun counting down. (The Accu Slim beeped softly three times, while the Nano beeped twice.) Yes, you can wait until you've dropped your food into the bath to set a timer on these machines. But we think it’s a design flaw.

Even worse, both machines automatically shut off when the timers ended. This is frustrating and also potentially dangerous since foods could be left in the temperature danger zone, where bacteria flourish. (Although overcooked sous vide food is gross, too much time spent in a bacterial pool is even worse.)

In comparison, when the timer finishes counting down on the Breville+ app, the circulator keeps running, and the timer begins counting up, indicating how long the Joule Turbo has been holding the food at the target temperature. This is a much better system, but it's not perfect. You're relying on an app, so if that app—or your phone—crashes, you're in trouble. (This also applies to the Anova app. And actually, any app.) The Joule won't shut itself off if the app crashes; it will continue running, but you can lose your timer countdown. The reliance on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth means that if the connection is interrupted, the machine could stop and go into standby mode, ruining your dinner. Long story short: We prefer using a separate, independent timer to keep track of what we're cooking, rather than relying on the timer functions offered by the circulators.

The Best Sous Vide Machines Fit All Types of Cooking Vessels

Think twice before buying a very small sous vide machine. The final straw for the Nano came when we tried setting up water baths using different vessels. Its clamp is too high on the circulator to clip onto a Dutch oven.

We used Cambro containers in our tests, and also tried to secure the immersion circulators to a five-and-a-half-quart Dutch oven and a 2-quart stockpot. The Joule Turbo, Anova Precision Cooker Pro, and Anova Precision Cooker 3.0 were the easiest to secure. Joule's ingenious magnetic base makes it a breeze to set up, even though it is quite small, while the adjustable clamps on both Anova models were sturdy and provided versatility.

The Criteria: What to Look for in a Sous Vide Immersion Circulator

The best sous vide machines—and indeed, the only ones worth buying—are highly accurate. The ideal sous vide machine is fast, too. Our favorites weren’t bulky, but also weren’t so small that they didn’t work in large pots. The winning sous vide machines were all easy to use and had helpful apps or dead-simple but information-rich onboard displays. Price mattered, and we only recommend expensive immersion circulators when they’re truly worth the upgrade.

Our Favorite Immersion Circulators

The Best Immersion Circulator

Breville Joule Turbo Sous Vide

$250

$200 at Amazon $250 at Target

$250

$200 at Sur La Table

What we liked: The Joule Turbo is the second iteration of the Joule sous vide and improves upon the original design. It's faster thanks to an updated Proportional Integral Derivative or PID, which is an algorithm-driven temperature control module (also present in Breville's espresso machines). It's wicked accurate and fast, and, in our tests, heated up cold water in just 22 minutes. Its app is awesome, with how-to videos demonstrating everything, including how to clean a sous vide machine. It also has a plethora of integrated recipes, one of which we used to cook the salmon in our tests. Notably, the water temperature didn’t drop a single degree once we added the salmon to the preheated water. That’s impressive.

The Turbo feature is also new, and it promises to speed up the cooking time. We tried it out by making a steak. It was ready in just 41 minutes. Traditional sous vide would've required the steak to cook for at least an hour...and that's after the water bath is preheated.

Its magnetic base lets you stand it up in a pot (provided that the pot is made of a ferromagnetic material like stainless steel or enameled cast iron) without having to clamp it to the side. The Joule's impeller system, which sucks up water through the bottom of the unit and spits it out through a small outlet on its side, means that you need only a couple of inches of water to run the circulator; all other circulators require significantly more water to operate. That gives Joule the largest distance between the minimum and maximum fill lines. It also runs very quietly.

What we didn’t like: The big issue with the Joule Turbo is its lack of onboard display and controls. Of course, this helps contribute to the device's small size. It also means that you have to use your phone to operate it. The Joule’s standard-issue clip is narrow, making it difficult to attach vessels with thicker sides, like a Dutch oven. You can fix this problem by purchasing the Big Clamp accessory, but having to shell out for add-ons isn't ideal.

Key Specs

• Dimensions: 12.28 x 1.85 x 1.85 inches
• Connectivity: Bluetooth
• Wattage: 1100
• Compatible app: Yes
• Warranty: 1 year

The Best Immersion Circulator With an Onboard Display

Anova Precision Cooker 3.0

$140

$127 at Amazon $230 at Target

$229

$150 at Sur La Table

What we liked: The Anova Precision Cooker 3.0 has a large, clear onboard display and a simple interface. We liked that we could just set it up and go, rather than having to rely on our phones. The optional Anova app—which is compatible with all Anova immersion devices—worked well and was easy to navigate. It has loads of recipes, too, which makes getting started with sous vide easier for beginners.

The Precision Cooker has accurate temperature control. We never once mismatched the readout with our instant-read thermometer. It’s quiet, which was a joy after working with some of the louder immersion circulators. It also has an adjustable clamp that makes it easy to fit onto a number of vessels, including a thick-walled Dutch oven and a Cambro. The 3.0 version is significantly more powerful than the 2.0 version, bringing a gallon of cold water to temperature in about half of the time. 

We were alerted to a drop in temperature when we added ice to the hot water bath, which was comforting from a food safety standpoint.

What we didn’t like: The app wasn’t as intuitive and sleek as the Breville’s, and we had some trouble pairing at the beginning of our tests. The onboard display makes it much larger (and more difficult to store) than the Breville. But that’s the tradeoff.

Key Specs

• Dimensions: 4.1 x 12.8 x 3.07 inches
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi
• Wattage: 1100
• Compatible app: Yes
• Warranty: 2 years

The Best Splurge Immersion Circulator with an Onboard Display

Anova Culinary Precision Cooker Pro

$177 at Amazon View on Williams Sonoma $460 at Target

The Anova Precision Cooker Pro delivered in every category: accuracy, speed, efficiency, and design. At 1200 watts, it’s the most powerful immersion circulator of our winners. It heated a water bath in 32 minutes. It was also impressively precise; every temperature reading hit the mark.

The manual display was far and away the most pleasant to use. Unlike the majority of other models with onboard displays—which require the user to toggle between temperature and timer—the Anova shows the current temperature, the target temperature, and a timer all at once. If speed is important to you, it’s worth considering an investment in the Anova Pro. Don’t discount the app: As mentioned above, it’s efficiently designed, easy to use, and comes with plenty of recipes and cooking tips. 

The Anova Pro’s handsome design is clever, too. With its sturdy, non-slip clamp, it effortlessly fits almost any cooking vessel, including Cambros, Dutch ovens, and stockpots. It recovered from temperature dips within a couple of minutes. It can heat up to 26 gallons of water at a time (a benefit that may not matter much to you) and withstand being dropped, bonked against a countertop, or submerged in water (an important feature for immersion circulators). 

What we didn’t like: It’s one of the biggest, priciest immersion circulators we tested, although the mega wattage and awesome display are to thank for that. And it’s not as big as the Instant Accu Slim. 

Key Specs

• Dimensions: 13.8 x 3.5 x 2.4 inches
• Connectivity: Bluetooth
• Wattage: 1200
• Compatible app: Yes
• Warranty: 2 years

The Best Affordable Immersion Circulator

Instant Accu Slim Sous Vide Immersion Circulator

$110

$99 at Amazon View on Walmart $100 at Kohls.com

What we liked: The Accu Slim is a no-frills immersion circulator that punches above its weight class. It heats water faster than many more powerful and expensive models. Despite its relatively low wattage, it took just 16 minutes for a gallon of room temperature water to reach 190˚F. Its onboard display always showed an accurate temperature; we checked it frequently with an instant-read thermometer. The lack of bells and whistles makes it easy to set up and operate. It’s also an outstanding choice for someone new to sous vide cooking who just wants the basics.

Despite being fixed, the clamp fits plenty of vessels. It’s also specifically designed to attach to the inner pot of an Instant Pot. It has a good warranty that’s on par with the Breville Joule Turbo’s. It's easily the best affordable circulator we tested. It's pretty incredible that you can purchase a very solid immersion circulator for less than $100.

What we didn’t like: Its timer alert was quiet and very easy to miss unless you were standing right next to the model. Because the clamp is fixed rather than adjustable, it can't be secured to every vessel. The Accu Slim is not so slim; it’s the biggest sous vide machine on our winners list. It easily scratched and dinged, too.

Key Specs

• Dimensions: 15.94 x 7.52 x 4.92 inches
• Connectivity: N/A
• Wattage: 800
• Compatible app: No
• Warranty: 1 year

The Competition

• Breville Joule Sous Vide: This was our previous top pick and what we recommended for many years. However, it's been phased out and replaced with the Joule Turbo.
• InkBird Precision Sous Vide Cooker: At just $85 and popular with reviewers, this 1,000-watt model from Inkbird (a brand known for its smart digital thermometers) unfortunately didn’t deliver. It was one of the slowest in our water bath test and struggled to maintain a steady temperature over the course of an hour. It’s not compatible with all cooking vessels, either: the attachment clip was poorly placed, making it too large to attach to a shorter Dutch oven. 
• Monoprice Sous Vide Immersion Cooker: With a complicated interface, a toggle wheel that made nailing an accurate temperature unnecessarily frustrating, and a bulky size, this model was, overall, tough to use. More to the point: it never hit the 190°F mark in our water bath test. Its outstandingly low price point is attractive, but the temperature variations coupled with the conservative wattage (800) couldn’t knock our current budget winner from its throne. 
• Anova Culinary Sous Vide Precision Cooker Nano: This was our runner-up in the category of affordable immersion circulators, but its frustrating clamp design and sluggishness to heat a water bath are problematic.
• All-Clad Sous Vide: This model is bulky and extremely loud, and it gave inaccurate temperature readings during our testing. It's also very expensive.
• Gramercy Kitchen Sous Vide Immersion Circulator: This immersion circulator also gave inaccurate temperature readings and was unable to reach 190°F (88°C) during testing. It also appears to now be discontinued.
• Chefman Sous Vide Circulator: This model is incredibly loud, and its motor jostles water around violently, all while the circulator struggles to reach high temperatures. Here's another machine that is discontinued.
• Gourmia Digital Sous Vide Machine, Wancle Sous Vide Cooker, and Kitchen Gizmo Sous Vide Immersion Cooker: These models all suffer from poor design features and controls that make them frustrating to operate. The motor on the Kitchen Gizmo circulator was so weak that it was hard to tell if it was actually circulating any water while in use. Most of these are discontinued.
• Breville PolyScience HydroPro Sous Vide: This machine is powerful but expensive. At over twice the price of our overall winner, it’s difficult to recommend this immersion circulator for the average home user, even if it did perform well. 
• SOUSVIDE ART Precision Cooker Kit: This model performed fine but was outshone by our budget pick, which is cheaper and more accurate. 
• KitchenBoss G322T Sous Vide Cooker: With confusing instructions and inaccurate temperatures, this model failed to meet our basic criteria for a sous vide machine. 
• Bosenkitchen Sous Vide Cooker: Varied temperatures throughout the water bath meant this model had a weak motor that couldn’t keep things consistent. This machine is also discontinued.
• Vesta Imersa Elite Precision Sous Vide Cooker: The water bath dropped four degrees when the chicken was added, which was a bigger temperature swing than any other models tested, creating accuracy and consistency concerns.
• Anova Culinary Sous Vide Precision Cooker 2.0: This was our top pick for many years—and it’s still great. The 3.0 version is just more powerful and close to the same price. 
• Anova Culinary Precision Cooker Mini (AN300-US00): This sous vide machine just wasn’t mighty enough. We don’t think it’s worth buying.
• Inkbird WiFi Sous Vide Cooker (ISV-101W): The control panel on this model was pretty sparse, though we did like that it had one in addition to an app.

FAQs

How expensive are sous vide machines?

In 2009, the first circulator priced under $500, called the Sous Vide Supreme, made its debut. Today, you can choose between several machines that cost less than $100. 

At-home immersion circulators have settled mostly into two main pricing tiers. There's a group of higher-end models with features like apps, WiFi, and voice-control connectivity. These models go for at least $160. The second tier is more affordably priced, with devices that offer fewer bonus features but cost less than $100. As with many kitchen appliances, the cost is not always indicative of quality, and dropping a couple of hundred bucks doesn't necessarily mean you'll get a great sous vide device. 

What are the benefits of sous vide cooking?

Sous vide allows you to cook things gently and consistently (thanks to the temperature-controlled water bath), and with minimal hands-on time. It gives you incredible control over whatever you’re cooking and can reliably deliver protein that is tender and juicy.

What do you need to get started cooking sous vide?

To start, you’ll need a sous vide machine. (Presumably, you know this.) You’ll also need a vessel to submerge the immersion circulator in; we like Cambro containers, but you can also use a stock pot or Dutch oven. A vacuum sealer and bags are really helpful in creating a tight seal so water can’t enter the bag. We also recommend having a cast iron skillet handy. It helps create a quick sear on meat after it’s finished cooking with the immersion circulator. binder clips are great for keeping the sous vide bag in place, and pingpong balls or sous vide balls slow water evaporation. For a more comprehensive deep dive into sous vide cooking, plus all of our favorite gear, check out this primer.

Is sous vide safe?

When done correctly with an accurate immersion circulator, sous vide food is perfectly safe to eat.

Can you sous vide in an Instant Pot?

Yes, you technically can sous vide in certain models of the Instant Pot (the Pro, Max, and Duo Plus), but this appliance is considerably less accurate than using an immersion circulator. Instant Pots take longer to preheat and do not maintain water temperature as reliably as a purpose-built sous vide machine. We don’t recommend it. A better option: You can use the inner pot of an Instant Pot as the vessel for your standalone immersion circulator.

Why We’re the Experts

• Rochelle Bilow is an editor at Serious Eats, a culinary school graduate, and a former professional line cook.
• Riddley Gemperlein-Schirm is the associate editorial director at Serious Eats, who has reviewed thousands of cooking tools. 
• Sasha Marx was a senior culinary editor at Serious Eats. He previously worked at America’s Test Kitchen and as a professional chef. Sasha contributed research to this review.
• For this review, we tested 22 sous vide machines, scoring them on speed, accuracy, user-friendliness, and overall design.