The 3 Best Sous Vide Machines of 2024 | Reviews by Wirecutter

Nov 01, 2024

By Ben Keough

Ben Keough is an editor covering cameras, working from home, powering, and hobbies. He also writes about coffee, beer, and food for Wirecutter.

Since Anova is now requiring new customers to pay for a monthly or annual subscription to use its app, we have moved the Precision Cooker 3.0 to Other sous vide cookers worth considering.

The inexpensive, app-free Monoprice Strata 800W is once again our top pick.

If you like to experiment in the kitchen, you might have fun with a sous vide cooker, a device that cooks foods slowly and precisely to the perfect temperature—think custardy eggs, effortless medium-rare steak, and falling-apart pork shoulder.

After testing dozens of models since 2013, we’ve concluded that the Monoprice Strata Home Sous Vide Immersion Cooker 800W is the best sous vide immersion circulator for home cooks.

Though this circulator lacks the app integration of more expensive wireless-enabled cookers, it nails the basics, with easy-to-use controls and precise temperature settings. It’s also remarkably affordable, which is sure to please sous vide fans of all experience levels.

This no-frills sous vide cooker is affordable, accurate, and easy to use. If you don’t absolutely need app control (and most folks don’t), this wand will get the job done.

This cooker is the smallest and most powerful model we tested, and it works with less water than most other options. But it lacks physical controls, which may be a dealbreaker for some people.

Most sous vide machines we’ve tested cook food equally well, so we focused on their controls, clamping systems, size, and speed.

Holding a precise temperature is extremely important, so we tested each cooker’s temperature accuracy and variance.

Sous vide cookers produce a range of noises, from quiet rustling to high-pitched whining. Generally, quieter is better.

Features such as in-app recipe libraries, low-water alarms, and smartphone notifications are nice to have but not essential.

This no-frills sous vide cooker is affordable, accurate, and easy to use. If you don’t absolutely need app control (and most folks don’t), this wand will get the job done.

The Monoprice Strata Home Sous Vide Immersion Cooker 800W is the least expensive model we’ve tested, but that doesn’t mean it’s cheaply made. The Monoprice cooker is reliable, accurate, and simple to use, so it’s a wonderful option for everyone from sous vide beginners to seasoned cooks.

Unlike some of the most popular circulators available—including those from Anova and Breville—this model lacks any sort of wireless connection, so you have to set the temperature and timer on the device itself. But our testing has shown that sous vide apps are disappointing more often than not, so this model’s simplicity may in fact be a plus.

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This cooker is the smallest and most powerful model we tested, and it works with less water than most other options. But it lacks physical controls, which may be a dealbreaker for some people.

Breville’s The Joule Turbo Sous Vide relies exclusively on your smartphone for all temperature and timer adjustments since it doesn’t have physical controls. If you’re okay with that—and the high price—this cooker is in many ways the best you can buy.

It’s extremely small, it holds temperature accurately, it heats water the fastest of all the wands we’ve tested, and it can cook with less water in a pot, thanks to its magnetic base and unusual pump system.

It’s also the first home sous vide cooker to use algorithms to enable delta-T cooking, which strategically overheats the water bath so that your ingredient reaches its desired core temperature sooner. If the Breville+ app has a Turbo recipe for what you want to cook, it can potentially be done hours faster than it would with a competing cooker, though at the moment the app offers relatively few Turbo recipes to choose from.

For the most part, we loved the app; it works over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, depending on how far you are from the Joule Turbo, and we encountered only occasional delays as it reconnected to the machine, which had no effect on our cooking experience.

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I’ve been writing for Wirecutter since 2015, covering everything from printers to coffee to cast-iron bakeware. I’m an avid home cook, an experienced beer brewer, a sourdough specialist, and an aspiring pitmaster. I’ve been cooking with sous vide, starting with the original Anova Precision Cooker, for almost a decade. During that time, I’ve used it for everything from cooking steaks and lamb chops to controlling the temperature of my mash when brewing beer.

For this guide:

A sous vide cooker is often seen as a luxury in a home kitchen—an unnecessary toy, best for true food nerds. Though it’s true that sous vide is ideal for people who love playing around with new recipes and techniques—and are willing to wait for hours for a dish to finish cooking—sous vide machines have plenty of other applications that could appeal to a wider range of people (more on that below).

Put simply, a sous vide circulator is a device that uses an electric heating element to heat a water bath and an impeller or pump to circulate the water and keep it at the set temperature. To cook food, you seal it in a bag and immerse it in the hot water bath for anywhere from 45 minutes to 72 hours or so.

The goal is to cook your food evenly from edge to edge, at the ideal temperature. And the results can be glorious: steak that’s a perfect medium rare throughout, chicken so tender that you don’t even need a knife, and eggs with the consistency of custard. It doesn’t heat up your house, either.

But while sous vide is most famous for cooking mouthwatering steaks and chops, it can do much more. Like a slow cooker, a sous vide cooker can break down tough cuts of meat and make them fork-tender. It works great on vegetables, too, producing perfectly creamy potatoes and turnips, or vibrant corn and carrots with a toothsome texture; the method is known to preserve the colors of vegetables beautifully.

It can also serve to make yogurt, acidify sour beer, prepare cheese, proof bread dough, render fat into tallow, and even infuse edibles with marijuana or flavor alcohol. It has plenty of nonculinary uses, too—foot baths, bottle warming, and film development are just a few. For the most part, making all of that happen is as easy as pressing a few buttons.

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You can choose from a few types of sous vide machines, but for most home cooks, an immersion circulator is the way to go. This type of machine clamps to the side of a vessel—be it a pot, a plastic tub, or even a cooler—and not only heats the water but also uses an impeller or pump to circulate the water around the container, ensuring that the entire water bath stays at a constant temperature.

Immersion circulators are typically smaller, more affordable, and simpler to use than some of the alternatives, such as all-in-one baths, which marry the circulator with a permanently affixed container.

Although all the sous vide immersion circulators we’ve tested do what they say on the box, a few traits separate the best from the rest:

We’ve been testing sous vide cookers since 2013, and in that time we’ve found that since most models we’ve tested consistently accomplish their most important task—heating water to a set temperature and keeping it there—usability is what separates an average circulator from a great one.

So, as we begin each new round of testing, we try to answer a series of questions: How does the cooker attach? How precise does the water level have to be? How big is the machine? How large of a container does it need? How loud is it? Is it easy to use? Does it issue audible alarms to indicate when it’s at temperature and when it’s done cooking?

Still, sous vide cooking is undeniably technical. So in addition to usability, we test for speed, accuracy, and consistency.

For each cooker, we first check to see if the reported temperature in a bath of cold tap water matches the reading from a calibrated instant-read thermometer. If it doesn’t, we adjust the calibration (where adjustment is available). Next, we heat 4 quarts of water from groundwater temperature (around 54 °F) to the temperature necessary to cook steak to medium (135 °F), confirming the temperature at both points with the same calibrated thermometer.

Since everyone has a different groundwater temperature, the time each machine takes to heat the water bath to 135 °F doesn’t tell the whole story. So we determine each machine’s speed in degrees per minute, as well. (A higher number here is better.) Then we let the wands run for two hours, checking the displayed temperature every 10 to 15 minutes to confirm that they are maintaining a steady temperature.

After we dismiss contenders that are awkward to use, too noisy, or otherwise notably flawed, we use our finalists to cook real food.

We start by following a recipe for soft-cooked Japanese-style onsen tamago, setting the circulators to cook the eggs for 13 minutes at 167 °F. We then judge the results on how closely they conform to onsen tamago’s ideal of silky whites and set but creamy yolks.

Next, since sous vide is popular with vegetarians as well as with carnivores, we cook carrots for an hour at 183 °F to get the classic texture of glazed carrots—cooked through and fork-tender but not mushy.

Finally, we cook thick rib eye steaks. For the app-connected machines, we use their preprogrammed thick-cut steak recipes, and for the circulators with physical controls only, we use J. Kenji López-Alt’s preferred medium-rare specs, cooking for two hours at 129 °F.

The last test involves searing. In addition to using a Bernzomatic DuraCast 8000 Torch and a screaming-hot cast-iron pan on an induction cooktop, we also sear our steaks over a grate-topped charcoal chimney and a lump-charcoal fire built in a kamado-style ceramic grill. With each method, we attempt to get a similar-looking sear, with an evenly browned exterior and just a little char. We judge each method on the time it takes to achieve the desired sear, the amount of smoke produced, the thickness of the gray ring (subscription required) in the finished meat, and the overall texture and flavor.

This no-frills sous vide cooker is affordable, accurate, and easy to use. If you don’t absolutely need app control (and most folks don’t), this wand will get the job done.

The Monoprice Strata Home Sous Vide Immersion Cooker 800W isn’t the most technologically advanced, the smallest, or the sleekest sous vide circulator, but it’s absolutely the best option for most home cooks. It nails the fundamentals at a surprisingly low price—about $80 at this writing.

In our tests, this simple-to-use model heated water quickly enough, kept the water at a reliably even temperature, and did so quietly. Our steaks came out tender and edge-to-edge pink, our carrots were bright orange with just enough bite, and our onsen tamago turned out silky soft.

It doesn’t have a wireless connection (and that could be a good thing). The Monoprice cooker lacks the app integration of more-expensive models like our upgrade pick, the Breville Joule Turbo, but the truth is that sous vide apps are of limited utility. (Our upgrade pick’s app is by far the best of the bunch, especially given its Turbo mode, but even in that case we’d prefer a cooker with physical controls.)

Unless you have a compelling reason to choose an app-connected circulator, the Monoprice cooker’s combination of touch controls and a tactile scroll wheel work just fine. And even though this model can’t send you notifications on your phone or smartwatch, it beeps loudly enough to be heard from several rooms away when it’s nearing the set temperature, so you can get to the kitchen and add your ingredients to the water bath. It beeps again when the cook timer expires.

It’s easy to use, and it works with a wide variety of containers. The Monoprice cooker’s plastic clamp slides over the metal casing and has a chunky screw that helps you secure it in place against the side of your pot. The wand offers more than 3.5 inches of range between the stamped minimum and maximum water-level markings on the body, so you can use it in plenty of container shapes and sizes.

Monoprice states that the cooker requires a 4.25-inch-deep container with a minimum capacity of 2.64 gallons, or 10 liters, for “optimal performance,” but we found that you really need just enough water to cover what you’re cooking. In our testing, we successfully ran the Monoprice sous vide machine in a 6-quart plastic Cambro container filled with just 4 quarts (1 gallon, or a little under 4 liters), which put the water level at about 4.75 inches deep.

It’s slower than some cookers but only by a few minutes. In our tests, the Monoprice cooker heated water at a rate of 4.55 degrees per minute—faster than our previous top pick, the Anova Precision Cooker Nano (4.05 degrees), the same speed as the Inkbird WiFi Sous Vide Cooker ISV-200W, and predictably slower than our upgrade pick, the more powerful Breville Joule Turbo Sous Vide (6.8 degrees).

Out of the box, our unit read 1 degree higher than the actual temperature as measured by our reference thermometer, but we were able to correct it easily using the built-in calibration feature. Once the cooker was at the set temperature, it held our water bath within ±0.1 degree for a full two hours.

It doesn’t make any annoying noises. This cooker was louder than some others we tested, but its constant low hum was a relatively soothing sound compared with some other cookers we’ve tested. At about 6 inches from the wand, we recorded a noise level of 48 dB, a result that was more or less in line with the Joule Turbo’s 50 dB.

Monoprice provides a solid warranty. Monoprice backs this model with a one-year warranty, which is standard on all of the company’s items. It also comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

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This cooker is the smallest and most powerful model we tested, and it works with less water than most other options. But it lacks physical controls, which may be a dealbreaker for some people.

Breville’s The Joule Turbo Sous Vide outperforms the competition in several ways. It heats water faster than our top pick, has a much smaller body, and works with an app that’s easy to pair, simple to use, and loaded with recipes. Some of those recipes can take advantage of what’s known as delta-T cooking, which can drastically speed up the typically long sous vide cooking process.

But the Joule Turbo costs a lot more than our top pick—$170 more, at this writing. And it’s devoid of physical controls, so it doesn’t work unless you tether it to a phone or tablet via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

For all of the great things the Joule Turbo has going for it, the lack of buttons is a big enough omission that we can’t recommend it as our top pick. But for people who can overlook that shortcoming, want the best overall performance from a home sous vide circulator, and are willing to pay for it, the Joule Turbo is the obvious choice.

We wish it had physical controls, but at least the app is polished. The Breville+ app (Android, iOS) is the best sous vide app we’ve tested, though it’s not perfect. We particularly like that the Bluetooth functionality makes pairing simple; in our tests, the app recognized our device right away, immediately downloaded and installed a firmware update, and then launched us right into cooking.

It’s also full of vetted recipes that include step-by-step instructions to adjust the cooking temperatures and times to account for the specific cut of meat you’re using—specifically, its thickness and whether it’s thawed or frozen—and your preferences in doneness and texture. The recipes guide you through the cooking process, though you can instead set these parameters manually.

The Joule Turbo uses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for communication with the app and switches between the two based on your proximity to the cooker. If you want to share your Joule Turbo with a family member or friend, they can easily control it through the app (as long as they have a Breville account and are logged in).

Turbo mode works well, but just a fraction of the recipes take advantage of it. The Joule Turbo is named after its unique Turbo mode, which uses algorithm-based delta-T cooking to achieve sous vide results much more quickly than standard cookers. Essentially, the app asks you for the thickness and weight of the item you’re cooking and then uses that data to determine how much it should overheat the water bath to reach the desired core temperature as soon as possible.

The result is that you can cook a piece of filet mignon, for example, in as little as 30 minutes. We tested this feature on some filets, one cooked with the Joule Turbo recipe, the other cooked with an original Anova wand for two hours at the same temperature (122 °F). The results surprised us: We actually preferred the Joule Turbo version, which had the same edge-to-edge doneness but retained a more traditional steak texture—more fibrous, less mushy than the portion cooked with Anova for two hours.

The Breville+ app has a growing number of Turbo recipes—52 as of this writing, for everything from salmon and scallops to beef and chicken. But you can’t simply toggle Turbo mode on for other recipes, so if a Breville recipe doesn’t exist for the cut you want to cook, you have to do it the old-fashioned way.

It heats fast, even without Turbo mode. The Joule Turbo’s 1,100 W heating element heats water quickly. In our tests, it brought 4 quarts of water to cooking temperature one minute faster than the Anova Precision Cooker 3.0 (which has the same power rating) and six minutes faster than the 800 W element in the Monoprice Strata Home Sous Vide Immersion Cooker 800W, achieving a heating rate of about 6.8 degrees per minute.

It’s tiny compared with most other sous vide wands. At about 12 inches long and 1.85 inches in diameter by our measurements, the Joule Turbo is a little over 3 inches shorter and half an inch thinner than the Monoprice wand. As a result, it could easily fit in pretty much any utensil drawer, whereas the Monoprice cooker (with its larger head, housing the display and controls) could fit only in our cabinets or deeper drawers.

It can work in shallower water than the competition. Another way the Joule Turbo preserves resources is by requiring less water. Whereas the Monoprice sous vide machine needs to be in at least 4.25 inches of water to operate, the Joule Turbo needs only 1.5 inches.

The Joule Turbo pulls in water through an opening just above the base, heats it, and then spits it out through a rectangular opening that doesn’t have to be submerged. The device also has a magnetic foot that allows it to stick to the bottom of some pots.

We were able to use a Dutch oven for sous vide cooking with the Joule Turbo, a task that would have been difficult with the Monoprice cooker because of the pot’s curved, relatively short walls. The Joule Turbo just stuck right to the bottom, and we were ready to go.

It isn’t the quietest cooker, but it isn’t annoying either. The Joule Turbo is slightly louder than the Monoprice and Anova cookers we've tested, but it’s not bothersome. All three are perfectly pleasant-sounding; the Joule Turbo’s sound signature in particular is defined primarily by the white noise of rushing water.

When the water pump outlet isn’t underwater, it gurgles like a fountain backed by a faint whine and registers about 70 dB; when it’s fully submerged, the sound is smoother, and the noise level dips to around 50 dB.

Breville’s short-term support is solid. The Joule Turbo comes with a one-year warranty, which is more or less standard in the industry and matches that of our top pick from Monoprice. Anova is an outlier, with a longer, two-year warranty.

Long-term support is unclear, but Breville seems committed. Our biggest concern regarding the Joule Turbo’s app-only nature has nothing to do with the quality of the app: Rather, it’s the question of what happens to your sous vide machine if Breville stops selling it and supporting it with software updates or simply goes out of business.

That question doesn’t seem to have any easy answers. Breville’s warranty covers the Joule Turbo for just one year, and despite Breville representatives telling us via email that the app has “a 30-year certification to operate in the cloud” (we’re honestly not sure what that means for actual owners), the company doesn’t make any explicit promises of future software support.

Cooking your food sous vide gets you only halfway to a delicious meal. That’s because the water bath brings ingredients up to the proper temperature but leaves the outside the same color as the inside, without any of the tasty and texturally pleasing exterior you get from other cooking methods. (This is as true of veggies as it is of meat, but we’re here to talk specifically about big ol’ chunks of protein.)

You can find a lot of debate over the best way to sear steaks and other meat, and even when to sear it—before or after your sous vide session, or both. So, in an effort to identify the best searing methods, we took thick-cut rib eye steaks that we cooked with our sous vide finalists and tried four options:

We could have tried lots of other methods, including using a garden-variety propane grill, deep-frying the finished steaks, cooking them caveman-style directly on hot coals, or using lava (seriously, check out this video). But we chose the above four methods because they seemed to strike the best balance of accessibility and flavor potential—and because we didn’t have a propane grill or lava handy.

We used our finalist sous vide cookers to cook our steaks. With the app-connected Breville and Inkbird models, we followed the best steak recipes available in their respective apps; with the Monoprice cooker, we followed J. Kenji López-Alt’s recipe for medium-rare steak and cooked for two hours at 129 °F.

Ultimately, we found that all four methods produced tasty steak with slightly different looks, texture, timing, edge-to-edge doneness after searing, and final flavor. (Every steak lover has their own preferences, but I was shooting for an even mahogany crust with light charring, an edge-to-edge pink interior, and a soft, juicy texture.) So, rather than recommending a single method, we’re recommending several different methods for different situations.

This torch is affordable, compact, and solidly built, and it can use readily available small gas cylinders. It burns really hot, too, but you can adjust the flame for a more precise sear.

If you live in a small apartment or just don’t want to deal with smoke, we strongly recommend the Bernzomatic DuraCast 8000 Torch paired with a small propane tank. That’s mostly because it’s easy to store in a small kitchen and produces the least smoke of any searing method.

The torch took about five minutes to thoroughly sear a thick-cut rib eye (including the edges), which is on the slow side compared with the other methods we tried. The steak was extremely tender, had a minimal gray ring around the pink center, and exhibited no unwanted flavor from the propane. Compared with other torches, the Bernzomatic torch strikes a great balance between power and price, and we found its flame-control adjuster to be helpful in searing more sensitive foods such as cheese or crème brûlée.

This affordable pan is lighter than a traditional cast-iron skillet and a little shallower. It’s an ideal shape for searing, roasting, and sautéing.

To get the crispiest sear on your steak, we suggest using a very hot cast-iron skillet with just a little neutral oil—as long as you don’t mind smelling like smoke all day. We used a Lodge skillet on a portable induction cooktop, which got the cooking surface up to about 650 °F.

Using the induction burner allowed us to cook outdoors and avoid smoking up the house. You can still use this method on a kitchen stove, but if you do so, be sure that you have a way to vent the smoke, which is voluminous. In our tests, after just three minutes (flipping every 30 to 45 seconds), we had a beautiful, extra-crispy crust, and the pan contained a thin layer of rendered beef fat that made a great gravy.

This steak had the thickest gray ring of the four, likely due to its direct contact with the cooking surface, but the ring was still less prominent than what you get from most conventional cooking methods. Like the torch, a cast-iron pan doesn’t contribute any flavor of its own, but it allows you to finish your steak with butter, herbs, or garlic if you like, which you can’t do with a torch.

From burgers to chicken to slow-smoked ribs, this Weber model’s time-tested design produces excellent results—for a terrific price.

If you love smoky-tasting meat and have the patience to build a fire, finish your steak on a charcoal grill, preferably with hardwood lump charcoal. We seared ours over mesquite lump, which burns clean, produces a lovely aroma, and allowed the grill grates to hit a surface temperature of 700 °F. At that temperature, the steak acquired a beautiful crust, complete with pronounced grill marks, in just three minutes. The flavor was wonderfully smoky, and this method also produced the skinniest gray ring of all thanks to its especially brief contact time.

The big downside here is that you have to build a fire, which can take up to an hour. But if your steak will cook for a couple of hours, that’s plenty of time for you to get the coals going. It can also feel wasteful to build a whole fire just to sear a few steaks, but in my opinion, it’s a great excuse to grill more stuff: If you’re not grilling some asparagus, onions, peppers, or cabbage—yes, cabbage—to go with your steak, you’re missing out.

We didn’t love the results from searing a steak on a grate directly over a roaring charcoal chimney. Although we were able to get a thorough sear in around four minutes, the overall crust wasn’t as pretty as what we got from the pan, and the smoke flavor was more acrid than the results from the full charcoal grill.

In a previous round of testing, we tried the popular Booker and Dax Searzall. This cone-shaped attachment for the Bernzomatic torch features two layers of wire mesh at the end that help spread out the flame, so you can cook more surface at once. But it also slows down searing. Ultimately, we liked the results but not enough to justify the attachment’s extra cost. Because it’s an add-on to the Bernzomatic torch, we suggest starting with the torch by itself and upgrading only if you’re looking to take your searing to the next level.

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Because sous vide cooking in the home has been so heavily driven by innovative people putting things together piecemeal and experimenting in their kitchens, you can find a lot of fantastic recipes online. But if you want a superb technical breakdown of sous vide cooking that’s available at no cost online, Douglas Baldwin’s excellent “A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking” is likely your best bet. It’s a fantastic look at the science of sous vide, offering details about proper handling, cooking times, and various other techniques.

If you’re interested in diving deeper into the science of cooking and other advanced techniques, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking and Modernist Cuisine at Home are two bibles. They’re expensive but immaculately researched and gorgeously photographed.

It’s also worthwhile to check out Serious Eats’s sous vide recipes and how-tos, J. Kenji López-Alt’s excellent book The Food Lab (which features many sous vide recipes), and the recipes from the people behind SousVide Supreme appliances (which are just as applicable to other machines). Alternatively, for anyone who is carb-avoidant, Nom Nom Paleo has some delicious options.

In order to cook sous vide, you need to put your food in a bag and eliminate all of the air around it. A vacuum sealer is ideal for this, but it’s not a requirement. Another option is to put delicate food in a zip-top plastic bag and use the water-displacement method to force the air out of the bag before sealing it. Here’s how it works:

Put the food in the bag and seal it almost completely, with just a small section of the zipper left open. Immerse the bag in a container of water, leaving the opening just above the water line. Allow the air to escape, slowly pushing the entire thing under, and then seal it just before the opening gets submerged.

The drawback to the water-displacement method is that your food might take on a little water while cooking, depending on the quality of the seal you can get with your zip-top bag. If it’s something you’re worried about, you can double-bag. But in most cases, if your bags seem to take on a lot of liquid while cooking, it’s most likely coming from inside the food.

If you don’t mind paying for a subscription to use app controls: The Anova Precision Cooker 3.0 was our top pick until Anova decided to paywall its app features in mid-2024. App annoyances aside, this cooker is well built, capable of heating water quickly (as quickly as our upgrade pick from Breville), and easy to use. It’s also typically $50 less expensive than the Joule Turbo, and often even cheaper.

Anova’s app subscription costs $2 per month or $10 per year, and it gives you access to a library of recipes, as well as wireless control over the cooker itself. If you opt not to subscribe, you can still use the Precision Cooker 3.0, but you’re limited to using its physical controls.

Although we don’t think that would be a huge inconvenience for most people—we still use physical controls most of the time, when they’re available—we do think that Anova’s decision to sequester controls for the device behind a subscription is unfortunate and anti-consumer.

If you like the sound of the Anova Precision Cooker 3.0 and don’t mind waiting a bit longer for your water to heat up: Consider the Anova Precision Cooker Nano 3.0. This sous vide cooker is usually about $50 less than the Anova Precision Cooker 3.0 and has almost all the same features. The primary differences are its weaker 800 W heating element (compared with the regular Anova Precision Cooker 3.0, which has a 1,100 W heating element), its nonremovable clamp, and a smaller range between its minimum and maximum water-level lines.

In our tests, the Precision Cooker Nano 3.0 heated a 4-liter water bath from 53 °F to 135 °F in 17 minutes—four minutes slower than the more powerful Precision Cooker 3.0, but a minute faster than our top pick from Monoprice (which also has an 800 W element). It was just as accurate as its more expensive stablemate, uses the same app with all the same features and recipes, and was similarly simple to get connected and cooking.

It has virtually the same dimensions as the pricier Anova model, but is just a bit easier to store because the nonremovable clamp isn’t as deep. It also weighs about half a pound less.

Like the Precision Cooker 3.0, the Precision Cooker Nano requires you to subscribe to the Anova app for remote control, notifications, and recipe access.

If you want a more affordable app-connected sous vide circulator: Give the Inkbird WiFi Sous Vide Cooker ISV-200W a look. In our tests, this 1,000 W circulator heated a water bath at a rate of 4.55 degrees per minute, matching our budget pick from Monoprice, and it kept the set temperature within ±0.2 degree. It offers temperature calibration, too. Along with the very similar ISV-100W, this model was the quietest circulator in our test group at a mere 39 dB.

Though the Inkbird app isn’t as polished as Breville’s app for the Joule Turbo Sous Vide, it pairs smoothly with this circulator and provides reliable push notifications and easy control of temperature and timer settings. The app also contains plenty of recipes for a wide variety of proteins, though it doesn’t guide you step-by-step like Breville’s app does.

The ISV-200W is substantially larger than the Joule Turbo and even a bit bigger than the Monoprice cooker, so you need to keep it in a cabinet or large drawer. And although Inkbird is gradually building a reputation for quality devices, we still have concerns about the app’s privacy and security practices due to the company’s unclear privacy policy and a lack of public-facing security documentation.

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This is not a comprehensive list of all the sous vide cookers we’ve tested. We have removed any cookers that have been discontinued or no longer meet our criteria.

Anova’s Precision Cooker Pro is the company’s high-end sous vide machine, designed for professional chefs. This 1,200 W circulator can keep up to 100 liters of water at a set temperature and can cook for up to 10,000 hours (416 days!). Anova advertises it as being accurate to within 0.09 degree, too. For day-to-day home use, however, it doesn’t offer any notable advantages over cheaper options.

The Inkbird WiFi Sous Vide Cooker ISV-100W is nearly identical to the ISV-200W. One difference is that it can heat water to 99 °C (210 °F), in contrast with the ISV-200W’s limit of 90 °C (194 °F). But since few sous vide recipes go above 170 °F, that added range is unlikely to be useful for most people. It also allows you to access preset cooking routines from the cooker’s built-in display rather than only via the Inkbird app, but since you can’t update the machine’s firmware, those routines are frozen in time—and they’re much easier to select via the app, anyway.

The Instant Accu Slim Sous Vide Immersion Circulator V2 is reasonably priced and quite compact, but it suffers from a poor interface and inaccurate temperature control. It also resets to its factory-default time and temperature settings (four hours at 133 °F) after every cooking session. Finally, our test unit read 0.6 degree high out of the box, and the device offers no option to calibrate the reading.

In our tests, the Vesta Precision Imersa Elite heated water quickly, and its app worked better than all but that of Breville. However, its short, stubby, flat design is less flexible than the cylindrical shape of most other cookers, so it doesn’t fit well in stockpots and other round containers. The 1.75-inch range between the minimum and maximum water levels was also the smallest we saw. In our tests, it read 1 degree lower than the actual temperature, and it doesn’t allow for calibration.

This article was edited by Marilyn Ong, Gabriella Gershenson, and Marguerite Preston.

Yes, Ziploc freezer bags in particular are BPA-free and generally leakproof. You just need to get all the air out. There’s a trick to this: Once you’ve put the food in, seal the bag most of the way but leave a small section open. Then immerse the bag in a large container of water, leaving the opening just above the water line. As you lower the bag, all of the air will be pushed out, and you can then seal the opening.

A sous vide machine can’t “overcook” a piece of meat the way a pan is liable to—since the water bath never exceeds a set temperature, your steak can remain medium rare for hours. But it’s still a bad idea to leave your food in for longer than the recipe recommends. Over the course of hours, the meat will become mushier and more unappealing.

A sous vide machine allows you to cook food slowly to a precise, uniform temperature. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of preparing a perfectly medium-rare steak, a juicy chicken breast, or a just-runny-enough egg. That kind of control also gives you more room to experiment and try new things in the kitchen.

Ben Keough

Ben Keough is the supervising editor for Wirecutter's working from home, powering, cameras, and hobbies and games coverage. He previously spent more than a decade writing about cameras, printers, and other office equipment for Wirecutter, Reviewed, USA Today, and Digital Camera HQ. After four years testing printers, he definitively confirmed that they all suck, but some suck less than others.

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