The Best Drip Coffee Makers (2025), Reviewed by Our Experts

The Aiden didn’t have a hot plate because the included thermal carafe kept coffee hot on the dining room table for around two hours. The two filter baskets, one for three cups or fewer and one for more than three cups, have spring loaded seals, so that when you remove them to empty the grounds into the garbage, you don’t get any stray drips on the floor. The Aiden also has a removable side water tank, which is easier to fill than either a built-in tank or one on the backside of the machine. All carefully considered details. Check out an even more detailed run down on the Aiden here.

It is expensive—the most expensive brewer we tested. It’s doesn’t cost that much more than other high-end machines like those from Ratio or Breville, but $365 (at the time of writing) is a lot to pay for a drip coffee maker. The only other small quibble we have with the Fellow is that, switching from the small filter basket to the bigger one isn’t as seamless as everything else. All you have to do is toggle a knob, but it’s just not as smooth an operation as the multitude of other settings on the Aiden.

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The best simple drip coffee maker: Ratio Six

The Fellow Aiden is a great coffee maker but it has a lot going on. We know that some people’s idea of a drip coffee maker is something you load up with coffee, turn on and leave to do its thing. But just because you want something simple doesn’t mean you have to compromise the quality of your coffee. That’s the idea behind the Ratio Six (which is actually an 8-cup coffee maker, don’t let the name fool you). It’s got one button that begins the brew process. There is no water temperature to set, no flavor profiles to adjust. But the brewing process, like the Fellow’s, is designed to mimic a pour-over. The Ratio first blooms the coffee then uses a slower flow to get better extraction. The resulting brew is absolutely delicious and takes no effort on your part. The newest version of the Ratio Six improved its thermal carafe and it was the most effective we tried (the Fellow was a close second), keeping coffee hot for over two.

The biggest issue with the Ratio is filling it. It has a fixed water tank on the back of the machine. That meant we either had to set it sideways on the counter or slide it out from under a cabinet to fill with water. The brew basket also sits on top of the carafe instead of being attached to the body in any way. That made it easy to empty, but was a little precarious to set up until we got the hang of it.

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The best budget drip coffee maker: Braun Brewsense

Let’s get something straight about budget coffee makers off the bat: They don’t make coffee that’s as good as the machines that precisely regulate water temperature and flow rate. These are the style of coffee maker you might find at an adequate but not excellent Airbnb. So while the Braun is the top of its category (anything $100 or under), we didn’t judge it against the Fellow or the Ratio, we judged it against the Mr. Coffees, Ninjas, and Black & Deckers that you can read about below. But the Brewsense did an admirable job for something we frequently find on sale for less than $80. The coffee was flavorful and not at all stale or watery. It also came out at a ready-to-drink temperature. Contrast that with some cheap coffee makers produce coffee that is so hot it needs a few minutes to cool down.

For such an inexpensive coffee maker the Brewsense also came with some nice features like the ability to slow down the water flow in order to brew small batches from one to four cups and a hot plate with adjustable temperatures to keep coffee from getting burnt while it sits.

The glass carafe wasn’t our favorite. It flipped open a little too easily. That seemed like it could cause some spills. And frankly, a thermal carafe would have been nice. Some other budget machines have them.

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The best big coffee maker: Oxo 12-Cup Coffee Maker

We don’t have any real issues with the quality of the coffee or the functionality of either the Fellow or Ratio coffee makers, but neither of them count as XL coffee makers in our book. The Oxo 12-cup machine gives you 20% more volume while still keeping the quality of the coffee very high. It uses a similar rainmaker showerhead as the Oxo cold brew coffee maker, which does a wonderful job of even saturation. The resulting coffee is the kind of nuanced, fresh-tasting carafe we’d expect from something at this price point, but there are a couple other features that push this one to the top of the pile. First is its range. It can brew anywhere from a single cup of coffee all the way up to 12 cups with no sacrifice on flavor or aroma. That means that if you’re someone who has the occasional big brunch or other gathering, but most mornings just needs coffee for yourself, this coffee maker can serve you in every scenario. It also comes with a well-insulated stainless steel carafe that kept coffee warm enough to drink for almost two hours. Finally it has an entirely straightforward digital interface with a dial and a brew button that makes it easy to schedule a pot of coffee ahead of time. There are also those little design touches that tend to define Oxo products like a removable shower head for easy cleaning and filter holders that are flat on the bottom so you can set them on the counter or in the sink after a brew without them spilling everywhere.

What we didn’t like about the Oxo 12-Cup Coffee Maker

Its water tank is built into the body of the machine, and while the opening isn’t particularly small, it’s still not as easy to fill as if it were removable.

If you are absolutely set on a cheap drip coffee maker: Zojirushi Zutto 5-Cup Coffee Maker

For the most part we think the quality of coffee from more expensive drip coffee makers is so much better than very basic models that it is worth spending a bit more on an appliance you will probably use every morning. But we get that the notion of spending hundreds of dollars on a basic coffee maker may be off-putting. This petite coffee brewer from the maker of our favorite rice cookers performed surprisingly well for a machine near the bottom of our price range—$80 at the time of writing, though frequently on sale for less. It has a design that was novel to this testing that made the machine particularly tiny. The filter holder and coffee grounds sit inside the glass carafe cutting several inches off its height. That kept the coffee a little hotter than some other machines, but it didn’t taste burnt or flat. It’s simple to use with just one on/off button, and has a removable water tank, which is an uncommon plus in a coffee maker this cheap.

What we didn’t like about the Zojirushi Zutto

The single button does multiple things: brew coffee and adjust the hot plate. The second is not immediately clear and the instruction manual is not the most clearly written manuals we’ve ever come across. We also prefer thermal carafes to hot plates when it comes to keeping coffee warm, but that is an expected sacrifice when you drop this low in price.

How we tested coffee makers

These machines only need to do one thing: brew coffee. So we made copious amounts of coffee in them. If the coffee maker came with a reusable filter we used that, otherwise we used standard Melitta paper filters. We wanted to see them on their best behavior, so we always used the same blend of Counter Culture coffee beans, freshly ground with a Fellow Ode burr grinder. Using the same beans from the same roaster was our way of trying to keep the process as consistent as possible. If machines had features like a “bold” setting or the ability to brew half batches, we tested them to see what kind of difference the setting made (this was a particularly involved test with the Fellow and the Breville machines). For machines with thermal carafes we used probe thermometers to test how long they kept coffee above 110℉.

Here’s what we considered in our tests:

The single most important thing you want from a drip coffee maker is a pot of coffee you actually want to drink. We looked for coffee makers that provided the most depth of flavor and nuance to their coffee. Obviously we discounted anything that made coffee that was burnt or watery.

If you were on board for a long and complicated brewing process you’d probably be making pour-over coffee or espresso. The point of a drip machine is to deliver your morning coffee in large quantities with minimal thinking from you. That means it should be easy to fill and easy to operate. If a machine has lots of customizable options like the Fellow Aiden, we thought using them should still be straightforward enough that we could pick up their operation quickly.