We Made Dozens of Cups of Rice To Find the Best Rice Cookers out There

Best Overall

Cuckoo Rice Cooker

$280 at Amazon $280 at Walmart $280 at Macy's

In general, rice cookers make the process of cooking rice very easy. This one even has a computerized voice that talks you through everything, reminding you to lock the pressure-cooking lid and alerting you as your rice gets closer to finished. It's a fun and luxurious feature, and it's just one of several that make the Cuckoo worth its price tag.

This is an enormous machine, with a capacity of 10 cups of dry rice—that's 20 cups of cooked rice. But as a pressure cooker, the Cuckoo cuts down on cooking time for larger amounts. It made a full batch of white rice in about 25 minutes, and there's a special turbo mode that cuts that time by almost half. The nurungji mode creates a layer of crispy browned rice on the bottom of the bowl beneath a layer of perfectly cooked rice, and the multi-cook setting is meant to steam rice and an entree at the same time. We especially enjoyed trying out the GABA rice mode, which soaks brown rice in just-warm water for hours to start the germination process and release the amino acid, then cooks it to perfection.

Meant for big families who make rice multiple times per week, the Cuckoo is truly full-featured and can make lots of different dishes. It's heavy and takes up a lot of space, but it's also a workhorse that's designed to stay on the counter and can hold up to long-term daily use. It's on the pricey side, but we think it offers the best balance of cost and features.

Capacity (Uncooked Rice): 10 cups | Power: 1,150 watts | Time to Cook White Rice: About 25 minutes | Dimensions: 14.2 x 11.6 x 10.2 inches | Weight: 16 pounds

Best Budget

Aroma Housewares 8-Cup Rice Cooker

Orig. $33 $30 at Amazon $30 at Walmart $50 at Kohls.com

Considering how expensive high-end rice cookers can get, this one is shockingly affordable for its performance and features. The controls are basic, but they include separate modes for white rice, brown rice, and steaming, as well as a simple display that counts down the cooking time remaining. We found excellent results testing the machine with sushi, jasmine, and brown rice—especially the latter, which came out fluffy and not sticky at all. It automatically switches over to keep-warm mode when it's done cooking, so you don't have to worry about being right there in the kitchen as the timer ends.

The Aroma holds 8 cups of cooked rice (or 4 cups pre-cooking), which is on the smaller side for rice cookers but still enough to feed a medium-sized family. That also helps reduce its countertop footprint. The steamer basket and other accessories all stow away in or on the machine, which has a compact carrying handle that makes it easier to move around or tuck away in a cabinet.

Cleaning is also easy, as the pot has a heavy-duty nonstick coating that didn't give us any trouble washing by hand during testing. (The pot, steamer tray, and all accessories are dishwasher-safe, though the manual itself confusingly recommends hand washing only.) The only difficulty we had was getting a sponge into the small condensation collector area to wipe it down.

All in all, this is a great first rice cooker to test the concept of cooker versus stovetop, and we used it for many years, successfully. It was simple to understand and operate and reliably cooked white rice every time. Sure, it’s not as fancy or polished as some, but when we needed rice to serve with our chop suey or refried beans, this one fit the bill.

Capacity (Uncooked Rice): 4 cups | Power: 450 watts | Time to Cook White Rice: About 25 minutes | Dimensions: 8.6 x 8.5 x 9.3 inches | Weight: 4.9 pounds

Best Multipurpose

KitchenAid Grain and Rice Cooker

$300 at Amazon

This new device from KitchenAid is our new best friend in the kitchen. Not only can it cook rice and other grains, but it also has a steaming function that can be used on its own, or foods can be steamed on top of rice or beans cooking below, as long as you don’t mind a little bit of flavor mingling—not a big deal if you’re serving them together. 

Unlike other cookers that tell you to measure the rice and then add a measured amount of water, often using lines marked on the inner pot for different types of rice, this cooker is much more sophisticated. For one thing, it has an integrated scale. We simply poured rice or beans or lentils into the pot until it looked just about right. When the amount isn’t within the right range for cooking properly without boiling over, the cooker told us during the next steps. The correct amount of water is added automatically from the integrated reservoir. Oh, but what if you want to cook in chicken stock? There’s a setting for that, so we could add the correct amount based on the weight of the food.

The cooker has settings for a wide variety of rice, beans, and grains. It doesn’t, however, have a setting for polenta, but we cooked that using the setting for steel-cut oats and it was great. You can choose firmer, normal, or softer settings for each food, too. There are also custom settings, and those can be saved. We’re planning on creating settings for extra-soft beans for refried beans, as well as well-cooked congee. 

While the steamer basket is fairly small because it’s designed to perch above the food, we successfully cooked a whole cauliflower right in the pot. We like the delay-cook setting, so the cooker can be set up in the morning, and ready in time for dinner. Whatever is cooked, there’s a keep-warm setting, so if the main dish is taking a bit too long, the rice will wait politely.

Is there anything this can’t do? Sure. There’s no sauté setting to cook vegetables or rice before adding the water. But that’s a small thing, considering all the other things this can do. There is also no automated way to add a little more time after the cooking time is up.

Capacity (Uncooked Rice): 4.25 cups (of Jasmine rice) | Power: 750 watts | Time to Cook White Rice: 30 minutes (on the Jasmine rice setting) | Dimensions: 9.75 x 13.5 x 8.88 inches | Weight: 10.5 ounces

Best Splurge

Zojirushi Induction Rice Cooker

Orig. $426 $333 at Amazon $320 at Walmart $365 at Williams-Sonoma

Every rice cooker that made this list does at least a pretty good job of cooking rice; it's more the size, design features, and extras that set one apart from another. This model—on the higher end of the range for Zojirushi, which is a luxury brand in general—offers ultimate rice-cooking customization. It uses induction heating for precise temperature control, and it has 11 different cooking options. Just for white rice alone, you can choose from standard, softer, and harder doneness, as well as special settings for jasmine and sushi rice, and a quick-cook function.

If you want hot rice at the ready at all times, this is the perfect machine for you: It has a pre-cooking timer you can set so a batch is done exactly when you want it, as well as a post-cooking keep-warm mode that can run for a full 24 hours. In our tests with both sushi and basmati rice, we got fluffy grains that didn't stick to each other or to the pot. Thanks to a nonstick pot and lid that keep everything contained and are both removable for easy washing by hand, cleanup is also very easy.

After continuing to test this machine at home for a while now, we still recommend it. We’ve never been the biggest fan of brown rice until this rice cooker came along. The gaba brown rice setting takes a long time, since it soaks the rice first, before cooking. But the result is the best brown rice we’ve ever had, and there was no need to buy rice that was labeled as GABA—any brown rice works perfectly.

One of the best features is the ability to schedule a cook, so we could wake up to steaming hot and perfectly cooked oatmeal. Thanks to the nonstick finish in the cooking bowl, it was easy to clean, which is a huge deal when dealing with rice that can be sticky. After many years of use, the body has a few dents from mysterious falling objects, but the cooking bowl looks virtually new, and this still works very well.

Now for the downsides. The main one is its huge price: This is a machine only worth the investment if you're going to make rice almost every day, especially if you like to make all different types of rice for different dishes. (For a less expensive option, we also reviewed the Zojirushi NS-TSC10 model.) Like other Zojirushi machines, it's also fairly slow. The gentle cooking helps with rice texture, but our test batches of white rice took 45 and 55 minutes to cook, and brown rice took 90 minutes.

Capacity (Uncooked Rice): 5.5 cups | Power: 1,230 watts | Time to Cook White Rice: About 50 minutes | Dimensions: 10 x 14 x 8 inches | Weight: 9 pounds

Best Small-Capacity

Aroma Housewares 6-Cup Rice and Grain Cooker

$20 at Amazon Orig. $32 $29 at Walmart

The 6-cup Aroma model is an excellent all-in-one machine for a single person. Its steamer insert is designed to cook a main course and the rice underneath at the same time, so you can make a multi-course dinner. Rice, salmon, and asparagus for one, say? This machine can do that. Just note that it can only do that one serving at a time.

The options here are pretty minimal: There's one cook setting controlled by an analog switch, with a simple glass lid that doesn't lock into place. Nothing can go in the dishwasher. The inner steamer does have its own cool-touch handles, which is a nice feature.

In testing, the Aroma did decently, though there was some variability from batch to batch: Jasmine rice came out perfect once and overdone a second time. (The small capacity means that small variances in the exact amount of rice and water make a big difference; measure carefully!) The machine automatically turns to keep-warm mode when it's done cooking, though the rice started to harden and stick to the pot after a short time, so we wouldn't recommend letting keep warm run for too long.

Oh, and did we mention this thing costs 20 bucks? If you're not looking for a large rice cooker or one with a lot of bells and whistles, this model's a steal.

Capacity (Uncooked Rice): 3 cups | Power: 300 watts | Time to Cook White Rice: about 18 minutes | Dimensions: 10.4 x 11.1 x 8.1 inches | Weight: 3.5 pounds

Best Large-Capacity

Zojirushi Rice Cooker

$199 at Amazon Orig. $236 $220 at Walmart $220 at Target

From the self-regulating time and temperature to the jaunty little tunes that play when cooking starts and finishes, most everything about this rice cooker is friendly. (Don't worry; you can change the songs to simple beeps if you prefer.) It has separate modes for white, brown, and sweet (aka sticky) rice, plus a general steaming setting and steamer insert. This thing can even bake a cake! It uses the nonstick rice pot as a baking dish.

Our testing resulted in beautifully cooked batches of white, brown, and basmati rice, all of which were better than we could manage on the stovetop. They also maintained their texture and temperature beautifully on keep-warm mode—even after four hours, there was a cloud of warm steam upon opening the lid, and the rice didn't stick at all.

Zojirushi machines cook gently for excellent rice texture, but the downside is that they cook slowly; this model needs an hour for white rice and 110 minutes (nearly two hours) for brown. There's a "quick" mode that works with only a minimal decrease in quality, but it still takes 40 minutes. However, the timer helps; you can set rice to finish cooking at whatever time of day you want, up to 24 hours ahead. In tests, it's nailed the time, starting to heat up at the perfect moment to finish cooking at the exact moment it's scheduled to.

This Zojirushi model is certainly on the more expensive side, but it's also huge, able to cook 10 cups at once and keep it hot and fresh for up to 12 hours. If you eat rice every day, or anywhere close to every day, it's worth the splurge.

Capacity (Uncooked Rice): 10 cups | Power: 820 watts | Time to Cook White Rice: 60 minutes | Dimensions: 9.9 x 15 x 11.2 inches | Weight: 11.7 pounds

Best Stovetop

Presto Stainless Steel Pressure Cooker

Orig. $80 $68 at Amazon Orig. $80 $76 at Walmart $80 at Wayfair

While our testing included only electric countertop rice cookers, you can of course make delicious rice on the stove extra-quickly by using a pressure cooker. This is our top recommended stovetop pressure cooker, with a safety release valve and automatic pressure regulator that simplify the sometimes-intimidating setup process. It's more complicated to use for rice than an automated rice cooker, but you can also use the Presto to speed-cook everything from pulled pork to risotto. You can also just leave the pot unpressurized and use it like any standard saucepan.

This model has a 6-quart capacity and is made from rustproof, nonreactive stainless steel. It can be used on any type of stove, including induction, and it has a long heatproof handle, as well as a knobby helper, handle on the other side to make it easy to move even when full. The pot and lid are dishwasher-safe for easy cleaning, though you have to remove the sealing ring and pressure regulator first.

Capacity: 6 quarts | Power: N/A | Time to Cook White Rice: 5-8 minutes | Dimensions: 17.3 x 9.1 x 8.8 inches | Weight: 5.3 pounds