Air Fryer vs Instant Pot: Which Countertop Cooker is Best for You?

A countertop cooking appliance can be a real game changer in the kitchen, allowing you to prepare healthier meals, cook more quickly, and even potentially lower your electricity bills. However, with so many diverse options currently available, it can be difficult to choose the right option for you. To help cut through the noise, we compare two of the most popular and effective kitchen appliances we’ve tested: air fryers and Instant Pots. Air fryers are the new kids on the block and are a dab hand at cooking fries, roast vegetables, and fish, while Instant Pots, the old stalwarts, work great for rice, soups, and stews.

If you’re unfamiliar with either appliance type, you can read our brief introductions and rundowns of their operation just below. Further down you’ll discover the pros and cons of each, in the areas of size, value, speed, and versatility. Finally, we finish with our final verdict, where we lay out which appliance type will suit you best depending on your cooking needs, budget, and kitchen setup.

What is an air fryer and how does it work?

Air fryers have exploded in popularity in recent years, but their relative newness and slightly confusing name means not everyone will be aware of how they work, so we’ll give you a quick overview.

An air fryer operates similarly to a convection oven, using a heating coil to generate hot air. The heated air is then evenly circulated around the cooking space using a powerful fan to reach the maximum surface area possible of the food being cooked. Separating air fryers from standard ovens are their smaller cooking compartments and powerful internal components, which allow them to concentrate heat more effectively to cook foods more rapidly. Other advantages of air fryers over their built-in cousins include their lower electricity usage and the need for less cooking oil to achieve well-browned, crispy results.

The most common type of air fryer is a basket-style model with a single removable cooking drawer. Other common formats include dual-basket options, front-opening tabletop oven-style air fryers, and fully fledged multi-cookers that include air frying as one of their abilities. Like most kitchen appliances, the price you pay will dictate cooking performance, the number of features, and accessories you get, with cheaper air fryers being more basic in their offering and more expensive models upping the versatility and performance.

What is an Instant Pot and how does it work?

Instant Pot is a line of electric pressure cookers made by Instant Brands, although many people use the term to broadly refer to all pressure cookers. An Instant Pot works by heating water or broth to create steam. This steam builds up under high levels of pressure thanks to the appliance’s tightly sealed lid, forcing heat into your food quickly and evenly. This quick, steam-based cooking process requires less energy and better preserves your food’s nutrients, compared to standard cooking methods such as frying and boiling.

In terms of cooking abilities, the majority of Instant Pots will come with a range of modes and features beyond just pressure cooking, with common ones including slow cooking, steaming, rice cooking, yogurt making, and sautéing.

READ NEXT: Are Air Fryers Worth It?

What are the pros and cons of air fryers?

Now that we’re familiar with the general setup and operation of air fryers, let’s take a quick look at their advantages, as well as some of the potential drawbacks of which you should be aware:

Air fryer pros:

Quick and efficient cooking – Due to their compact cooking spaces and powerful heating elements and fans, air fryers can cook your food quickly and efficiently, saving you time and shaving a few dollars off your electricity bill.

Easy to use – Generally speaking, and especially in comparison to pressure cookers, air fryers are considered to be pretty user-friendly. Most models have presets for specific food items to get you started, alongside simple manual settings for time and temperature.

Simple clean-up – Almost all air fryers you’ll encounter will have a non-stick coating on their drawers and inserts, meaning they only need a quick clean with warm, soapy water. Many models also have drawers and accessories that are dishwasher-safe, making clean-up even simpler.

Healthier meals – Thanks to their rapid, powerful circulation of heat, air fryers require little to no cooking oil to get the same results in terms of browning and crispness as your standard oven, and far less oil than deep-frying, making for healthier, lighter meals.

Versatile and varied – As noted above, air fryers come in all shapes and sizes with a varied range of features. With options ranging from single-drawer and dual-drawer models (arranged both horizontally and vertically), to oven-style units with rotisserie accessories and air-frying multi-cookers, you’ll be able to find something to suit your specific needs.

Available in small sizes – Since air fryers come in all sizes, you’re very likely to be able to find something suitably sized for your space, which is great news for those of us with more cramped or compact kitchens.

Air fryer cons:

Can dry food out – The rapid, high-heat operation of air fryers can sometimes be a double-edged sword, with food tending to dry out quickly if your cooking times are off. This can be avoided with some trial and error, but it’s still a factor worth considering.

Unsuitable for cooking in bulk – While larger, more expensive models such as the 7qt Ninja FlexBasket can rustle up some serious portions, your average air fryer is most suitably sized for single portions and sides, making them unsuitable for families and larger groups.

Not suited for soups, stews, or wet batters – While air fryers can cook a great range of items, from proteins such as meat and tofu, to fries, vegetables, cakes, and finger foods such as onion rings and gyoza, they’re unable to tackle liquid-heavy dishes such as soups, stews, rice, or wet-battered items that you’d traditionally deep-fry.

READ NEXT: Do Air Fryers Need to Preheat?

What are the pros and cons of Instant Pots?

Now that we’ve assessed the strengths and weaknesses of air fryers, we’ll take a look at what you should know, both good and bad, about an Instant Pot:

Instant Pot pros:

Multi-featured – Instant Pots have plenty of built-in versatility, with most models offering a solid range of extra cooking modes. The Instant Pot Duo Crisp, for example, has settings for roasting, baking, dehydrating, pressure-cooking, slow-cooking, rice-cooking, steaming, sautéing, and, giving it major crossover appeal for anyone reading this article, air frying.

Suitable for bulk cooking – Most Instant Pots have roomy capacities and are designed to cook foods that work well in large quantities, such as soups and stews. This makes them perfect for larger families or for batch-cooking and saving leftovers to reduce the amount of cooking you need to do during the week.

Quick cooks and one-pot meals – After preheating, pressure cooking in an Instant Pot is a speedy affair, with most items taking less than 10 minutes. There’s also an endless supply of recipes online for handy one-pot Instant Pot meals, which can seriously reduce the hassle of making midweek meals.

Delay-start and keep-warm functions – Many Instant Pots offer users the ability to add ingredients and delay the start of cooking for a number of hours. Used in conjunction with an Instant Pot’s keep-warm function and its slow-cooking mode, this can allow users to cook whole meals while they’re out of the house and have them timed and ready for when they return.

Preserves nutrients – A quick, steam-based cooking method, pressure cooking better preserves the nutrients present in your food compared to more nutritionally wasteful cooking methods such as boiling or reheating.

Instant Pot cons:

Learning curve – Pressure-cooking can be fast and a little unforgiving until you know what you’re doing, so you may find yourself overcooking delicate items such as vegetables on your first few tries. Once you’re in the swing of things, you’ll find Instant Pots are pretty straightforward, but just be aware that there’s a bit of a learning curve.

Large and bulky – If you’re short on kitchen space, then an Instant Pot might not be the perfect fit for you. Most models are fairly large, bulky, and – in my opinion, at least – not particularly easy on the eyes.

Preheat times – While the actual cooking process of a pressure cooker is pretty speedy, you should be aware that creating all that steam and pressure takes time. Pressurization can take 10-15 minutes on its own, which puts Instant Pots a little way behind air fryers in terms of speed, many of which don’t require preheating at all.

READ NEXT: Are Air Fryers Healthy?

Air fryer vs Instant Pot: Which appliance will suit you best?

Both air fryers and Instant Pots are useful kitchen appliances that help take a lot of the hassle out of meal times. However, they operate very differently and tend to excel at different types of cooking, so choosing the best one for you will largely depend on your kitchen setup and the types of meals you typically cook.

Operating similarly to a convection oven, an air fryer will suit you best if you like to roast meats and vegetables, cook crispy fries, or make baked goods. Air fryers also keep things simple, being easy to operate with dishwasher-safe or non-stick parts that reduce clean-up time. Other advantages of air fryers include their speedy operation, the low amount of oil required to achieve crispy results, and their relatively low electricity usage. Arriving in all shapes and sizes, an air fryer is a great option for anyone looking to pick up an appliance to cook side portions or fit in a smaller space; there are larger, oven-style, and multi-drawer models available, though, if you want to cook in bulk. However, on the whole, air fryers don’t quite match up to Instant Pots when it comes to cooking larger amounts of food.

An Instant Pot is perfect for cooking meals such as soups, stews, rice, and one-pot meals, representing a great option for anyone looking for a set-and-forget option, or wanting to cook in bulk to feed a group. For those who want versatility from their cooking appliance, an Instant Pot is the way to go; they’re multi-functional, with common cooking modes including roasting, baking, dehydrating, pressure-cooking, slow-cooking, rice-cooking, steaming, and sautéing. However, Instant Pots tend to be a little bulkier than air fryers and have a slightly steeper learning curve, so you should consider how much space you have and your familiarity with pressure cookers before making a purchase.