The 3 Best Espresso Machines for Your Home

Jan 29, 2024

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$500

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$442

$441

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$1100

$880

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$865

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$745

$649

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By David Murphy

A cappuccino, latte or even just a straight shot of espresso can be an excellent start to your morning or provide those much-needed midday boosts. Unlike drip coffee makers, which cost a few hundred dollars at most and do all of the work for you, espresso makers under $1,000 require more active involvement; for many people, that hands-on action is part of their appeal. The best espresso machines, like Breville's Bambino Plus, excel by keeping your pulls as consistent as possible and minimizing the busywork once you’ve learned the art of the espresso.

While you can buy fully automatic espresso machines that work at the push of a button, they cost significantly more and remove that human element. To get the best result from the machines we recommend, you need to find the right grind size for your beans; ensure that you’re getting the perfect brew ratio and time for that roast; and if you’re using milk, make sure it's frothing at the right consistency and speed for whatever drink you’re making. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have a handcrafted beverage to enjoy, and you can always keep tinkering.

The Bambino Plus will also require you to have (or purchase) a stand-alone grinder, a setup all the experts we talked to recommended. Similarly, the gorgeous Gaggia Classic Pro—an entirely manual machine that needs one important DIY upgrade—can give you incredible results, as long as you’re willing to work for them. However, if you’re looking for a true all-in-one unit that can do it all, the Breville Barista Touch and Breville Barista Pro are solid systems that cost about as much as you should spend if this is your first foray into all-in-one espresso systems.

$500 at Amazon

$500 at Breville

The Bambino Plus punches far above its weight. It has every feature you need to help you pull the perfect espresso over and over again.

Breville's Bambino Plus has more critical features and customizations than any other espresso machine at its price point, and it's perfect for people who are interested in espresso but aren't ready to commit to a device that costs thousands of dollars. With its relatively low price in the category, you’ll have plenty of extra cash to spend on an amazing coffee grinder that, alongside the Bambino Plus, will give you even better results than all-in-one systems that cost twice as much (or more).

Of all the espresso machines we researched, the Bambino Plus contains the essentials every amateur barista needs and won't monopolize your kitchen counter. This includes a reasonably sized 54-millimeter portafilter for single and double shots; a built-in Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) temperature controller to regulate water temperature for precise, consistent brewing; a proprietary "ThermoJet" system that makes the Bambino Plus ready to brew seconds after you hit the power button; and an automatic milk frother.

Most importantly, the Bambino Plus's settings for pre-infusions (the amount of time the machine runs a little water through the "puck" of coffee in your portafilter) and shot volume (how much ends up in your cup) can be customized for both single and double shots. Being able to manually specify times for either is critical to ensuring that you’re getting consistent results once you’ve dialed in your process, which includes figuring out the perfect grind size for your coffee beans, the exact ratio of ground coffee to brewed beverage you want and the precise number of seconds the Bambino Plus should be extracting (typically around 25 to 30 seconds).

The settings for the automatic milk frother aren't as robust as what you’d find on more expensive systems like Breville's Barista Pro, and not as good as using a stand-alone frother, but you get a decent range of three options for both temperature and foam levels and it's delivered in under a minute with minimal extra work required.

The main downside of the Bambino Plus is that you can only have one customized preset for a single and double shot. If you prefer a different brewing technique for other beans, grind sizes or coffee styles, you’ll have to finagle that manually. We also don't love the removable water tank compared with sleeker designs such as those you’d find on machines including the Gaggia Classic Pro, but that's more a matter of preference than a true deficiency. The drip tray is also smaller than we’d prefer, and its design makes it tricky to place a scale and a cup underneath even if you remove it (for those taking a scientific approach to dialing in the perfect brewing ratio).

That said, the Bambino Plus ships with an excellent assortment of accessories, including a fairly hefty tamper, which more than makes up for any minor annoyances. Breville also offers stand-alone parts in case anything happens to break (or go missing) during your espresso journey, and it's great to have this much repairability in a sub-$1,000 machine.

$441 at Amazon

$442 Save $1

If you want to master manual espresso-making, the Gaggia Classic Pro is a good option that would fit in at a coffee shop.

If you fancy yourself a serious home barista, or want to become one, the Gaggia Classic Pro is a lower-price powerhouse that may be for you. Unlike the Breville Bambino Plus, it's entirely manual. There's nothing to configure, no buttons you can mash to help automate parts of your pull and absolutely nothing you can just walk away from. While that might sound like a deal-breaker at first, we don't think it's a problem if you’re committed to teaching yourself how to create fantastic espresso drinks at home.

Many people enjoy the process of espresso as much as the pull, for the same reason some people prefer a manual car to an automatic. The Classic Pro requires you to dial in your shots without any presets. This big, bulky beast of an espresso machine has only three buttons to worry about. One powers it on, one activates the brewing mechanism and the third gets the single boiler piping hot for the steam wand. (You adjust the temperature using a knob, which feels infinitely better to use than the buttons on other machines we tested.)

You’ll spend more time waiting for the boiler to heat up than you would with the near-instant Bambino Plus. But even when the Classic Pro's indicator light suggests it's time to brew, you’ll still want to test your temperatures. We experienced some pretty significant temperature swings throughout the Classic Pro's warm-up process, which was our biggest issue with this espresso maker. Even when you think it's really ready to pull a shot, you might even need to dabble with some temperature surfing to ensure you’ve hit the perfect 195 to 205 degrees Fahrenheit temperature for your pull. That entails waiting for the heating indicator light to turn off, pulling hot water (instead of your espresso) and waiting for the light to turn on again (indicating the Classic Pro's heater has kicked on). You’ll then wait however long you need, likely 15 to 30 seconds, to ensure you’re within that perfect temperature range. Yes, it's a bit of a hassle.

But once you’re comfortable with this give-and-take, the Classic Pro is every bit as capable of making a delicious espresso as more expensive "beginner" machines like the oft-recommended Rancilio Silvia Espresso Machine. Removing the Classic Pro's drip tray (and placing a small glass under its drain pipe) gives you plenty of room to fit a scale and a full-size coffee cup, the ideal setup for those looking to get their brewing ratios right. And while its steam wand has two holes to the Bambino Plus's four, and only swivels but doesn't move up and down, it's quick to heat up and performs adequately. If you need lots of steam for your drinks, though, the Silvia's larger boiler is probably a better bet.

We think that buying an aftermarket PID for the Classic Pro alleviates its biggest sticking point, but installing one basically requires you to open up your machine and mess with its wiring. If you’re enthusiastic about perfecting espresso, you’re probably a tinkerer at heart, so we don't think this is too far out of the realm of possibility. But it's definitely a procedure that some people won't want to mess with. If you’re not comfortable making that modification, and need more hand-holding for your espressos, Breville's Bambino Plus is a better buy.

Finally, should your Classic Pro ever break, or you lose any critical items, Gaggia sells spare parts that you can use to get your setup working again. That's particularly useful if you voided the Classic Pro's one-year warranty by installing your own PID.

$880 at Amazon

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$1099 at Sur la Table

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This is as close as you’ll get to—and as much as a beginner should pay for—a near-automatic espresso experience.

While you simply won't find an espresso machine that can do everything by itself—at least, not around the maximum of $1,000 or so that experts told us you should be paying for your first one—Breville's Barista Touch comes close. It's not perfect, but it does a fairly compelling job of getting your beans ground, your espresso brewed and your milk automatically foamed, so long as you’re willing to invest some time into setting up exactly how you want each process to go. It should only take a few drinks’ worth of trial and error to dial in on your ideal grind size and times, as well as your preferred milk temperature and foaminess.

Every expert we talked to recommended you buy your own stand-alone coffee grinder, which will give you a wider range of options and better quality for the espresso you brew. But if you don't have the counter space, or the patience, the Barista Touch's built-in grinder does a good enough job. The touch screen gives you a visual indicator of grind size (along a 30-point scale), and you can (and should) adjust the automatic grind time for your drinks to ensure that you’re getting enough material for whatever size you selected. (In our experience, the grinder really struggled to output anything finer than a 10 or so, and we had to add more time to fill the portafilter to the right amount.)

As for brewing, the Barista Touch does as good a job as the Bambino Plus, which includes getting your water to a consistent temperature quickly thanks to the machine's built-in combination of a PID and its proprietary ThermoJet feature. You can customize the brewing duration as needed, in addition to selecting preset options for single and double shots, though you (oddly) can't set a specific pre-infusion time. It's a rare miss for Breville, given just how customizable the rest of the extraction process is (and that you get that feature in the much lower-price Breville Bambino Plus).

The various preconfigured drinks you can select on the Touch's interface all basically brew your espresso the same way; the main difference comes from the temperature and frothiness of your milk. When I let my partner (a former Starbucks Coffee Master) give the machine's auto-frother a whirl, she found the results good enough for the different beverage types we selected. We always got a better experience foaming the milk manually, but that might not be the case depending on your skill level (and desire to learn). You get more configuration possibilities for milk temperature and froth level on the Touch versus the Bambino Plus, which gives you extra flexibility to dial in on the exact drink you’re trying to make.

Though it's incredibly convenient to be able to program multiple drinks on the Touch, it's not as useful unless your entire household has very specific espresso preferences. If you don't mind a slightly more manual approach, including having to froth your milk yourself, you can save some money with the Breville Barista Pro, which replaces the touch-screen interface with a simpler LCD screen and dials. You’ll only be able to customize one single- and double-shot espresso, but that should be more than sufficient for most people.

As with the Bambino Plus, Breville sells replacement parts for the Barista Touch online, should anything break or go missing during your espresso adventures.

$865 at Amazon

The Rancilio Silvia Espresso Machine costs hundreds of dollars more than the Gaggia Classic Pro, and you’ll also need a separate grinder (and probably an aftermarket PID, too). It has a huge boiler (compared with other machines) that takes some time to heat up but lets you pull more shots than the Classic Pro. Its milk-frothing wand is also superior; so much so that many Classic Pro fans install the Silvia's as an aftermarket modification.

$649 at Comiso Coffee

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The Lelit Anna PL41TEM, another highly recommended espresso machine, comes with a built-in PID controller for regulating water temperature and a pressure gauge to help you hit the right level of extraction with each pull. Though it has no automated functions, it's a great alternative for those who really want to master manual coffee extraction, so long as you don't mind that its 57-millimeter portafilter is nonstandard (and might be harder to upgrade later as a result).

I’ve previously written about coffee grinders for Buy Side, and have talked to plenty of baristas and other experts over the last year to better understand all the many nuances of a great home-brewing experience. I’m still working to get to the point where I’m perfectly pulling my espressos each and every time. When I’m not loading up on caffeine, I’m usually building benchmarks and specs lists and testing routers, laptops and other consumer tech gear for various websites and magazines.

For this guide, I interviewed four baristas and coffee educators to better understand the key features a great espresso machine needs to have and how much most aspiring enthusiasts should realistically pay for one: James McCarthy, a 2013 Brewers Cup Champion and barista trainer for nearly two decades, who currently works as a coffee educator at Brooklyn's Driftaway Coffee; David Myers, a coffee-roasting consultant and educator at Working Title Coffee in Chicago; and Jake and Alejandro Griffin-Diaz, owners of the Jacob Alejandro cafe in Troy, New York. Both have served as coffee trainers for a number of years across a variety of businesses, and Alejandro recently won the Cold Brew Championship at Chicago's Coffee Fest in 2022.

Based on all of our research, and the opinions of all the experts we spoke with, a great espresso machine—one worth the time and effort that produces a great shot—will cost about $500 to $1,000. You can buy espresso machines that cost a lot more than that range, but at the lower end of it you can get a machine that gives you consistent, correct temperatures and automates some parts of the overall brewing and milk-foaming process.

"I think $1,000—really, almost $800 or $900—is right around where we’re getting into machines that have all the important characteristics," McCarthy says, noting that anything more than that might produce incrementally better espresso but it won't be like night and day the way espresso from a much lower-price machine would be.

Whether you should opt for a fully manual machine or one that automates parts of the drink-creation process comes down to a matter of personal preference. If you’re just getting started in your espresso journey and aren't sure how much time or learning you might devote to your daily drinks, having a machine that helps you out during parts of the brewing process, but also allows you to take over and do everything manually, is the best option.

You might want to think before you spring for an all-in-one espresso machine, which integrates a coffee grinder into the mix. All of our experts agreed that you’ll get the best results if you use a quality stand-alone grinder in addition to whatever espresso machine you purchase—so much so that the grinder should be your priority if you’re on a limited budget, not the espresso machine.

"Unless you’re getting a good consistent grind, the espresso is never going to be as good as it can be, no matter what [all-in-one] machine you’re using," Myers says. "A good grinder is going to really enhance that entire experience more than spending an extra $100 on the espresso machine."

One of the most critical features you should look for in a great espresso machine is a PID controller—"Basically, a more integrated kind of heating system that will only vary the [water] temperature by a degree or two at a time, which is really great for being able to make a good-tasting shot of espresso," McCarthy says. Consistent, correct temperatures help ensure that the quality of your drinks won't vary wildly from pull to pull.

Other characteristics that great espresso machines should have include:

I tested each espresso machine by using all of its features to make a variety of espresso-based drinks, mainly to ensure that an average person of reasonable skills could craft something pleasing. I did my best to "dial in" each machine to a reasonable brewing standard, with pulls ranging from 25 to 30 seconds that delivered a final product at roughly a 1:2 ratio of ground coffee beans (in grams) to brewed beverage (in milliliters). I had my partner, a former Starbucks Coffee Master, assist me with steaming and measuring foam quality.

I also measured each machine's water temperatures when brewing to get a sense of their consistency, timed how long it took each to reach a "ready to brew" state from powering up and even measured the foaminess of a variety of different presets whenever a machine had an automatic steam wand.