The Best Immersion Blenders

The bell housing is the reason to buy this one. Breville shaped the base like a dome with internal ribbing, which breaks the suction that pins a flat blade guard to the bottom of your pot. Breville says the design cuts hot-liquid splatter by up to 40% compared with open-blade models. In practice that means you can puree a full pot of butternut squash soup without wearing any of it.

The trigger grip matters more than it sounds. Instead of pressing a button on top with your thumb, you wrap your hand around the handle and squeeze — the way you'd hold a power drill. If you're blending a double batch of soup for ten minutes, that natural wrist angle is the difference between a job and a chore. Owners who blend daily consistently point to this as the feature they miss on other blenders.

Wirecutter has evaluated more than 23 immersion blenders over several years and has kept the Control Grip at the top of its list, with high marks in soup texture, emulsification, ease of use and cleanup. That's a long run at number one in a category where new models arrive constantly. The 280W motor isn't the strongest here, but soup is what most people actually make.

The base is non-scratch, so you can use it in a nonstick Dutch oven without gouging the coating. The 42-ounce jug nests the 25-ounce chopping bowl inside it for storage, which is a small thing until you live in an apartment with one utensil drawer. The whisk handles cream and vinaigrettes fine.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The attachments are the weak part. Several owners like the blender itself but find the chopper bowl and whisk noticeably less sturdy than the motor unit — plastic where you'd want metal. If the chopper is the main reason you're buying, look elsewhere.

At 280 watts, this isn't the one for dense work. A thick batch of hummus or a jar of nut butter will bog it down where the Vitamix or the All-Clad won't. It's also the tallest unit here at over 12 inches with the jug, so it won't hide in a shallow drawer.

It's not quiet. Nothing in this category is, but the plastic motor housing doesn't damp sound the way the all-metal models do — published testing puts stainless-shaft blenders about 5 to 8 decibels quieter at comparable speeds.

If your recipes are thick, wattage is the whole story. Tom's Guide ran a 32-ounce hummus blend and the Vitamix finished in 90 seconds; a comparable 200W model took three minutes and ten seconds. That gap widens with every extra cup of chickpeas. Owners who bought this specifically for hummus are the loudest fans of it, and they tend to be people who gave up on a lighter blender first.

The four-pronged blade base is different from the two-blade design most of these use. More cutting edges per rotation means fewer passes through the same pot, and it's part of why this one handles fibrous ingredients and cold, stiff mixtures without you stopping to stir. The 5-foot cord also matters if your only free outlet is across the counter.

Consumer Reports placed the Vitamix among the highest-scoring models for blending performance and long-term durability in simulated extended use. That's the case for paying up: not a better soup, but a blender that's still doing this in ten years. The all-metal build backs that up.

One-handed operation is genuinely thought through here. The controls sit where either hand falls, so left-handed cooks aren't fighting the design, and you keep a hand free to pour in stock or scrape down the sides.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

It's heavy and it's long. At 18 inches and nearly three pounds, it's a lot of blender to hold over a saucepan of gravy, and more than one owner who switched from a lighter Braun went back. The head needs a container with at least a 3-inch opening, so narrow protein-shaker bottles are out.

It's the most expensive unit in this guide, and it doesn't include a blending cup in the box. If you mostly make soup, the Breville does that job just as well for far less.

Nothing else here moves the blade vertically. America's Test Kitchen ran a standardized frozen-fruit benchmark against 11 fixed-blade models and Braun's oscillating blade produced completely chunk-free smoothies while the others didn't. If you've ever chased one stubborn piece of frozen mango around a cup, that's the problem this solves.

The SmartSpeed trigger has no preset speeds. You push gently for a coarse chop and harder for a fine puree, all in one motion, which sounds gimmicky and turns out to be the most intuitive control scheme in this group. There's no stopping mid-blend to click up a speed with a wet thumb.

Braun also builds in SPLASHcontrol, and says the MQ7 has 25% less suction than its own MQ500. Combined with the POWERBell Plus housing and its extra milling blade, it's the closest competitor to the Breville on the messiest job in this category — hot soup in a shallow pot.

The EasyClick Plus system swaps attachments with a single push, and the set covers blending, chopping, whisking and mashing. Owners who use it daily describe it as the one gadget that stayed on the counter.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The included beaker is plastic and feels cheap next to the motor unit. Several owners who like everything else about this blender single out the cup as the disappointment.

It's not the one for very hard ingredients. Owners report it handling soups, sauces and frozen berries well but struggling with genuinely tough stuff. There's also a recurring complaint about sharp edges on the housing making cleaning around the blade unpleasant.

This is the one people buy and then keep using. It's light, the trigger gives you fine control instead of fixed buttons, and the blending arm pops off for the dishwasher. Owners who've cycled through several brands tend to describe this as the first one that didn't bog down on a thick batch of sauce or mayo.

The removable pan guard is the underrated feature. It snaps over the blade housing so the metal never touches your nonstick Dutch oven. Most blenders here handle this with a plastic base ring you can't take off; KitchenAid lets you remove it when you don't need it, which also makes the housing easier to rinse.

The 8-inch arm reaches into a standard stockpot, and the 3-cup jar with a lid works for single smoothies and for storing what you blended. That's a smaller kit than the Breville or the Cuisinart, but it's the kit most people actually use.

It doesn't hold onto smells. Owners specifically mention blending garlic and onion without the odor lingering into the next batch — a real complaint on other models here, including the All-Clad.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The included jar is brittle Tritan plastic and isn't microwave or dishwasher safe, which undercuts the point of a storage jar. Plan on transferring to your own container.

There's no chopper bowl and no whisk. If you want an all-in-one appliance replacement, the Cuisinart or the Hamilton Beach gives you more in the box.

For soup, the gap is much smaller than the price gap suggests. In Wirecutter's budget testing round this model scored within 12 percentage points of the Breville on basic soup pureeing while costing roughly 75% less. If you make squash soup a few times a winter and blend the occasional smoothie, that's most of the performance for a sliver of the money.

At 225 watts it clears the threshold that matters. Good Housekeeping found that blenders under 150W couldn't puree cooked carrots in a single pass and needed stopping and stirring, while every 200W-plus model finished uninterrupted. This one sits comfortably on the right side of that line.

The attachments are the surprise. You get a stainless whisk and a 3-cup chopper bowl in the box, and all of them go in the dishwasher. That's a whisk-and-chop kit that some blenders costing several times as much don't include at all.

It's a good first immersion blender. Two speeds means one less thing to think about, the grip is simple, and if it dies in three years you won't feel it the way you would with a premium model.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The blades aren't as sharp as the premium models, and it shows. Owners report jobs taking two to three times as long as on a better blender, and some describe the blades dulling with use. Thick mixtures like hummus are out of its depth.

The build is plastic where the others are metal, and it's louder for it. The chopper bowl works but doesn't feel like it's built for weekly use.