11 best pizza ovens for indoor and outdoor cooking, tested by experts

This might not have the classic aesthetics of many of the other ovens in our line-up, but we found this little black box produces fantastic pizza. It takes a lot of monitoring and a little practice - we had to turn the pizza four times to ensure that the dough, cheese and ingredients were all cooked - but we had a perfect margherita within a minute. It’s a little labour-intensive, but the included paddle makes it easy to lift the pizza from the square stone.

The oven is easy to operate – one large dial ignites the gas burner, then enables you to set the burner to heat the oven and cook at high, medium or low heat, with the ceramic stone retaining heat well.

We liked the two U-shaped, stainless-steel, fold-out legs, which made the oven itself easy to set up, sturdy during cooking and added to the overall portability factor as the oven also comes with a carry cover.

Best of all, it’s far, far cheaper than other ovens on the market, saving you hundreds of pounds. It can’t quite match some of the Oonis and Gozneys on this list, but it isn’t worth paying hundreds (in the case of one Gozney, at least £1000) pounds more for a marginally better oven. That said, there’s no thermometer, so it takes a little practice.

We found this oven took a while to heat up (17 minutes), although it was quite cold and windy when we tested this model – if you’re firing it up in summer, it’s much more likely to match the manufacturer’s claimed 15 minutes. There’s no temperature gauge, so you will need your own infrared thermometer to identify when the ceramic stone is hot enough to cook your dough.

The pellet hopper is easy to fill, light and maintain throughout the cooking process, and the flame rolls nicely over the oven roof, but you’ll have to get busy with your peel (included) to avoid any overcooking or singeing of the crust. The oven dimensions are a little cramped for calzone, but we got away with it. As a pellet oven, it takes a lot of practice to keep the fire going.

That all seems a little negative, but if you can hack those minor technical issues, you’ll be rewarded with exceptional pizza in around a minute. This oven makes an excellent Neapolitan with 360 degrees of delicious crust and good cheese melt. The pellets lend the pizza the characteristic wood-fired pizzeria smokiness for hundreds of pounds less than the rest of the market.

It also comes with a sturdy carry cover. You should always be a little sceptical of claims that pizza ovens are portable. Though relatively lightweight, the awkward shape makes them hard to carry, so this carry cover is really best for keeping the oven out of the elements.

Ooni’s latest addition to its line-up has a cooking surface wide enough for 16in pizzas, and it reaches temperature surprisingly quickly (in about 20 minutes) for such a big oven.

You can check the Ooni’s digital temperature hub to ensure good control during the cooking process, with the physical display turning from green to red to let you know the oven is up to temperature.

All that heat is then kept in the oven by the glass door, which enables you to see the magic happen. More importantly, this keeps moisture within the oven space, softening the pizza dough a little and making it delightfully chewy, without overcooking or undercooking the sauce. It makes for the best pizza dough of any oven on the market.

As well as being able to accommodate larger dough bases, the karu 2 pro’s internal height of 5.4in means it’s perfectly suited to calzone. You could easily roast a chicken in the oven space, though it’s easiest if you spatchcock it.

Speaking of meat, there’s a plug-in probe for ensuring proteins are cooked, making this an incredibly versatile oven for pizzas, calzones and a variety of other meals. It’s a great jump-off point if you’re looking to serve more than just pizza to friends and family.

However, the usual caveats with Ooni apply. This oven is very expensive, and you don’t get essential kit like pizza peels and turners included as standard. If you want the best pizza possible, you need this oven, but it will cost you.

The roccbox has been a regular in our round-ups for years, as it consistently produces beautifully succulent Neapolitans.

Available in a range of colourways, its unique shape has the effect of elongating the flame and giving it a satisfying roll over the firebox roof. This makes for perfect crisp pizza crusts and well-melted cheese. It has an effective - if awkwardly positioned - thermometer, too, and it can be used on both gas and wood.

This flame is close enough to cook your pizza in no time at all, finishing off crisp margheritas in about a minute flat. There’s no door, so the heat retention could be a little better, but this is an excellent pizza oven for the price.

As ever, just beware claims that this is a portable oven. When full of its accessories, it weighs 24 kilos, so it’s not exactly one to take on a hike.

As the name suggests, the main selling point of this oven is its sheer size. With 24in of internal cooking area to play with, you can have up to three pizzas on the go at any one time and really test your pizza-paddling skills.

This huge internal capacity means that this oven takes a while to get up to temperature, but it’s worth the wait. You can go large with one massive 20-incher, or – because the oven is split, with two gas burners on either side – you can double up on dough. With a little planning, you can even have a pizza cooking on one side and sear a steak on the other.

The complexity of this oven’s dual temperature regions requires a very accurate gauge and the support of a clever app in which you can get accurate readings from the left side, the right side and the ambient temperature of the whole oven. The versatility of the oven is also helped by the two probes that can be used when cooking meat.

We actually found we hardly needed to turn our pizzas in the koda 2 max – it still provided even cooking of our Neapolitans, while there was plenty of height to accommodate crispy calzone with oozing cheese.

It’s a lot of oven and, at £900, it’s also a lot of money. Like other Ooni ovens, essential accessories aren’t included, so you still need to pay a little extra on top of that eye-watering price tag.

This Danish brand’s pizza oven looks like it’s just landed in your back garden from outer space. It’s a talking point before you’ve even cooked anything in it.

Thankfully, it will also be a talking point afterwards, as the pizza it produced was very, very good, while the wide mouth and dome also ensured our calzone was a triumph.

We were ready to go in just 13 minutes (and that was on quite a cold day), and our pizza cooked in just a little more than 90 seconds, with subsequent pizzas all coming in at around the same timing, so this aluminium oven has excellent heat retention

One thing to note is that, unlike other ovens with rotating stones that are battery-powered, the forno spin requires mains power. This could be pretty frustrating if you don’t have external plug sockets, as you’ll have to trail an extension cord from the house.

This is one of Gozney’s oldest ovens, but it’s still one of our favourites. Unlike the more recent Dome S1 or Gozney Arc (£599.99, Gozney.com, you can cook with both wood and gas.

The sizeable opening means it easily swallows a 15-16in pizza, cooking it in two minutes under a lovely, rolling, golden flame. Alternatively, there’s room for a couple of smaller pizzas and plenty more space for turning the pizza while it cooks, for optimum results. It looks great, too - it’s a stylish focal point for an outdoor kitchen.

However, the size means that this is pretty slow. It reached cooking temperature (500C) in around 50 minutes. That said, we could track the heat build-up with the mounted digital thermometer, which was very accurate.

Whatever the size, the dome produced wonderful Neapolitan pizza, with a perfect crust – puffy, airy and delicious to the bite, while the rest of the pizza was classically thin but equally tasty.

The insulation was fabulous and added to the stress-free experience, as we didn’t have to keep worrying about temperature control. This is a fantastic oven for anyone who wants to take their outdoor cookery up a notch or three. However, there’s no escaping the price - this is one of the most expensive ovens on the market.

The volt 12 is the only indoor/outdoor pizza oven on the British market. That makes it perfect for British weather - if a summer barbecue is rained off, you can move this oven indoors for the same delicious pizza.

It’s an electric oven, which means no more faffing around with kindling or gas valves; it just needs a power socket. It will take up a fair chunk of your countertop, so unless you have a space on par with Nigella’s, you’ll probably just be bringing it out when pizza is on the menu, and that also means finding somewhere to store it when it’s not in use.

Not that it’s an eyesore – Ooni has done its best to retain the sleek stylings of its purely outdoor ovens, with its steel and powder-coated shell housing a top and bottom heating element, so you have instant control over where the heat is coming from, which is handy if you’re keen on producing a variety of pizza styles, not just Neapolitan.

Three front-mounted dials control the timing, temperature and direction of the heat. In the absence of a flame, Ooni has inset a light into the ceiling of the oven, so you can see the pizza cooking. A chime lets you know when you’re up to temperature, and the numbers on the dial flash as the oven reaches each temperature level on the way up.

It also has a boost setting, which comes in handy to maintain the temperature when the door is opened to turn your pizza, which you will still need to do.

Finally, the pizza. Our Neapolitan was ready to go in 90 seconds, with the oven producing a base and crust with a lovely bite and aromatic, evenly melted mozzarella, time and time again. It’s pretty great pizza, but like all electric ovens, it doesn’t quite live up to the flavours of a flame-cooked pizza.

This Danish manufacturer has shrunk one of our favourite ovens of recent years, the 16in Etna rotante (£499, Amazon.co.uk), but kept the rotating stone that ensures a perfectly leopard-spotted pizza crust.

In fact, we think it's a little better than the original. There isn’t the booster burner flame under the stone, like in the Etna, to ensure a crisp base, but the piccolo’s performance equalled that of its bigger sibling. It offers a supremely controllable and reliable flame that fans around the dough in a C-shape, to ensure an even cook every time.

It’s faster than the original Etna rotante, too. The heat-up time was around 12-15 minutes, depending on the outdoor temperature, and this pizza oven kept the heat brilliantly, ensuring we didn’t have to wait long from one pizza to the next.

The controls are the same as the Etna – super straightforward, with a dial to ignite and control the main burner and a separate button to start the stone turning. This oven churned out foolproof Neapolitans time and again, but calzones were a little trickier because of the oven’s compact design.

Many pizza lovers will buy this oven for its space-saving credentials and excellent portability, although, for this reason, we’re a little surprised there’s not a carry cover available yet. However, there’s no thermometer.

Gozney are trying to create a market for portable pizza with their tread oven. There are plenty of accessories for this oven, but perhaps the most interesting add-on is the ‘venture’ stand, which enables you to set up the oven in whatever landscape you’re moving through, thanks to four rugged, self-levelling legs.

The oven itself has a gas burner on the left of the chamber and, like Gozney’s other ovens, such as the arc (£599.99. Gozney.com), the lateral flame rolls up the wall and arcs over the inside of the oven, to provide the all-important top heat.

The oven gets up to temperature in about 13-15 minutes, depending on the weather, and we found that, once the stone was ready, it was a good idea to turn down the flame a little to ensure top and bottom are cooked at the same time.

As long as you don’t take your eye off your creation for a second, you will be rewarded with perfect pizza cooked in less than a minute. Due to the size of the oven chamber, you’ll need to be pretty handy with your pizza peel, but we found it was easy to bump partially cooked pizza crust against the mouth of the oven, when it’s on the peel, to help you turn it.

As with all Gozney products, the insulation is fabulous, not only heating up the oven so that it’s ready to go in 14 minutes but also enabling it to cool quickly (around 20 minutes), so you’re ready to go in the shortest time possible after you’ve filled your belly.

However, while advertised as a portable oven, it’s not actually that compact. At 13kg, it’s Gozney’s lightest oven, but the awkward shape means it’s still clumsy to move around, even with the two big “roof-rack” carry handles on top. It’s certainly one of the most portable ovens on the market, but don’t expect to take it up a mountainside.

This Ninja model is also electric, but this one definitely isn’t for indoor use, mainly because of the real-wood pellet element, which will smoke you out of your kitchen in seconds, if you use it there.

This Ninja oven has the ability to cook 12in pizzas, from artisan to New York, and it even has a Calzone setting. Each setting adjusts the pre-heating and temperature of the oven, and we were left very impressed after trying all of them.

We enjoyed the artisan’s lovely charred taste and crispy crust, while the New York was suitably moist and chewy. The calzone was particularly impressive, with the oven’s boxy, rectangular design offering plenty of room for our calzone to puff up and get crispy.

There is the option to use the real-wood pellets to add a “woodfire flavour”, which gives each bite a smoky taste, but we found this quite hit and miss and, more often than not, the pizzas actually tasted better when we didn’t use the pellets.

On top of that, bear in mind that this oven is electric. It can’t get as hot as the best wood- and gas-fuelled pizzas, so you might find your pizzas a little soggy compared to the competition, especially if you make thick deep dish.