The Best Electric Kettles for Tea, Coffee and More - Buy Side from WSJ

Heat up your water to the exact temperature you want at the touch of a button with one of our top-pick kettles

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Written by

Contributor, Buy Side from WSJ

Tim Barribeau is a contributor to Buy Side from WSJ.

Updated October 16, 2024, 10:29 AM EDT

$90 $80

$45 $39

$104

$90 $85

$165 $140

$165 $132

$56 $32

$40

Before electric kettles were common kitchen appliances in U.S. homes (a surprisingly recent development), we relied on putting a pot of water on the stove or using the microwave, both imprecise heating methods, to get hot water for our drinks. Thankfully, there’s a much better way today. A good electric kettle will quickly and safely prepare water for tea, coffee, hot chocolate or even instant noodles, and make your life easier at every turn. And with more variable-temperature kettles on the market, you can now dial in exactly how hot you want the water for whatever it is you’re doing.

The Ninja Precision Temperature Kettle is worth buying for any kitchen. It not only has seven preprogrammed temperatures for coffee and a variety of tea types, but it also lets you dial in the precise temperature if you want more control. It’s accurate for when you need precision, it’s ergonomically comfortable to pour from and the wide top makes it easy to fill and clean. Hamilton Beach’s 1.7 Liter Cool-Touch Digital Kettle offers similar performance at a lower price, although we don’t love the looks or controls as much. If you want to up your coffee game, we recommend Oxo’s Adjustable Temperature Pour-Over Kettle. For a basic, one-setting boiler, choose Breville’s attractive and effective Soft Top Pure.

Buy Side Top Pick

$80 at Amazon

$90 save $10

$80 at Ninja Kitchen

$90 save $10

This all-around good kettle is decently fast to boil, accurate and comfortable, without any notable flaws.

The Ninja Precision Temperature Kettle offers everything you could want in a kettle. It’s a variable-temperature device that lets you choose the right heat level for specific purposes, like cooler water for delicate teas that easily turn bitter when exposed to boiling water or hitting 200 degrees Fahrenheit for your French press, and it’s very accurate in our testing. We quickly came to appreciate its slightly grippy handle that gives you a little more to hold on to than almost any other kettle, which is especially handy if you accidentally spill water on the handle when filling it up or you ever have issues with grip strength or pain in your joints. Plus, the large lid and top opening mean it’s easy to fill up from the most awkward of faucets, and I could even fit my long fingers in it for cleaning without a problem.

The Ninja is one of the more flexible variable-temperature kettles we encountered. It has seven temperature presets, from green tea (175 degrees) to boil (212 degrees). And if those aren’t enough, you can adjust the desired temperature in 5-degree increments down to 105 degrees. In our tests, this kettle had an average discrepancy of just 1 degree, well within the bounds of normal fluctuations. It also has a “keep warm” function that’ll hold your water at the desired temperature for up to 30 minutes (it keeps water at the boil setting at a slightly cooler 200 degrees).

The Ninja kettle’s controls are on its base, rather than the handle like some models including the popular Cuisinart PerfecTemp Cordless Electric Kettle. Some people prefer the buttons on the base over the handle, including Caroline Bell, co-owner of retail and wholesale coffee business Café Grumpy, but in our testing we didn’t find that control placement made a practical difference.

Because electric kettles all work with a pretty similar set of parts, they mostly heat up water in around the same time frame (with rare exceptions, which we speak to below). In our test of bringing 1.5 liters of water from 63 degrees Fahrenheit to a boil, almost every kettle took between six-and-a-half and seven minutes. This one fell right in the middle at six minutes and 45 seconds.

The Ninja has many of the same struggles as other kettles. Its exterior gets hot enough that it’ll burn you if you touch it for more than a second (like many kettles), and when you open the lid it’ll sometimes fling condensation upward. The buttons on the base mean it has a bigger footprint than some others, which is something to consider if you’re short on counter space. And some of the parts feel of middling quality, including the lid in particular, which feels thin and tinny. It’s worth noting that the lid joint is a frequent point of failure in all kettles, so you’ll see a number of complaints about that among customer reviews.

$39 at Best Buy

$45 save $6

$45 at Amazon

This kettle is just as good at getting your water to temperature as any other and stays cool to the touch.

For about half the price of the Ninja Precision Temperature Kettle, the Hamilton Beach 1.7 Liter Cool-Touch Digital Kettle heats just as effectively and has many of the same features. Its temperature controls are on-the-dot accurate, but there are only five presets instead of seven, and you can’t adjust the temperature outside of those options. Unlike the Ninja, the Hamilton Beach uses touch buttons on the side of the kettle. They’re like the buttons on many microwaves, sitting flush with the hard body of the kettle, so when you press them you don’t get the physical feedback of depressing a raised nub. If you’re blearily hitting “go” to heat up your water for morning tea or coffee, it just doesn’t feel as sure. Plus they can be slippery if there’s any water dripping down the sides.

One major advantage to the Hamilton Beach Cool-Touch is right there in the name. The interior of the kettle is insulated from the outside, so the exterior never goes beyond warm and there’s no chance of scorching your hand on the kettle. It’s great if anyone in your household has problems with dexterity or if you have kids (or pets who jump onto your countertops). The handle and the pouring experience are just OK, but knowing you won’t brush your knuckles against the kettle body and burn your skin gives it major comfort points. On the downside: The insulation means there’s no exterior marker of how much water is in the kettle, so you have to open the lid to check. We like the lid: It’s large and opens in two steps, so it’s notably less likely to eject hot condensation upward (though we did find it needs a bit of oomph to open and close).

$104 at Amazon

$105 at Wayfair

This model is faster to heat and more comfortable to hold than any other gooseneck kettle we tried.

Gooseneck kettles allow you to pour hot water in a very slow and controlled manner through a long, narrow spout, making them ideal for pour-over style coffee, though there’s no reason you can’t use them for other purposes. They fill a teapot just as well as a standard kettle, just much more slowly, and Ali Roth, who has owned and operated Berkeley, Calif.’s Blue Willow Tea since 2012, prefers a gooseneck for filling small teapots with awkward lids over a bigger option. The Oxo Adjustable Temperature Pour-Over Kettle, unlike other gooseneck kettles we tested, has the heating element from a much bigger kettle tucked into its small frame. That means it heated up 750 milliliters of water a full minute faster than most other gooseneck kettles and in less than half the time of the standard models.

The kettle uses a small dial that you spin and press to confirm for setting the temperature. Rather than have preset temps, the temperature ranges for various teas and coffees are written on the base and hidden when the kettle is heating. We’re not huge fans of the scroll-wheel interface because it can be slow to spin through all the possible temperatures degree by degree, but if you’re mostly leaving it on one temperature, it won’t be much of a problem.

Given Oxo’s dedication to accessible design, it’s no surprise this kettle had one of the most comfortable and stable grips we tried. Plus, the insulated lid won’t scorch your fingertips.

The Oxo kettle is acceptably accurate, usually within 1 to 2 degrees of the desired temperature, with one notable exception. When we turned it all the way down to its lowest setting of 104 degrees, it would actually heat to 115 degrees, a substantial difference. Oxo told us this is due to how the kettle’s thermostat works, heating at full power until the temperature is 10 degrees below what you set, and then turning it down to get to your desired temperature. “Because the thermostat is located at the bottom of the kettle near the heater, the temperature will sometimes reach a bit higher as the hot water rises and then subsequently mixes with cooler water at the bottom of the kettle at the end of the heating cycle,” says a company representative. “Additionally, when there is a shorter heating cycle (due to a low target temperature), there is less time to properly mix before it switches to keep warm.” That means this isn’t the right kettle for low temperatures, but we expect that to be an edge case for most people.

The Oxo’s spout has a subtly different shape to most other gooseneck kettles, narrowing with an elegant curve at the tip. The Oxo pours smoothly, from the smallest trickle to a full 90-degree pour. Even the most dedicated slow pour-over lover will appreciate just how finely you can control the rate of the water.

$85 at Amazon

$90 save $5

$90 at Williams Sonoma

This simple kettle is comfortable to pour from, features smart design choices to protect your hands and has good insulation to keep water warm even when turned off.

Some people don’t want or need a kettle that can heat water to specific temperatures. For those who just want a device to turn on and get hot water, but still would like something that feels nice to use and looks good on the counter, the Breville Soft Top Pure is fantastic.

Like most of our picks, the Breville Soft Top has a large opening to make it easy to fill and clean; it’ll also open slowly for more control. Rather than encasing the whole thing in an insulating layer, the Soft Top Pure is covered in key places to help prevent burns — the lid and near the handle are both nicely protected. The handle is one of the overall most comfortable we found thanks to a soft-touch grip, but we wish it were longer to accommodate more grip styles.

This kettle has the largest see-through window of any we found. Most kettles just provide a view of how much water is in the appliance, but the large window here allows you to actually see inside and watch how the bubbles are forming and how far along the water is in the boiling process. If you have a good eye and know what to look for, you can pretty precisely control the water’s temperature just by watching how big the bubbles are. Roth, who often uses a simple glass stovetop kettle, says “I can watch the bubbles boil and I can tell by watching the bubbles what temperature it is. You can learn your bubble-speak and gauge your temperature that way.”

Not everyone will want to pay this much for a simple kettle. But it’s a high-quality appliance that you may enjoy using rather than just a kitchen tool you tolerate.

$140 at Fellow

$165 save $25

$132 at Fellow

$165 save $33

$156 at Crate & Barrel

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Fellow offers its popular Stagg EKG kettles in two designs: traditional and gooseneck. We appreciate that they feature a beautiful design, and they’re both wonderful to pour from. But the traditional kettle’s 750-milliliter capacity is so much smaller than any other option — making only about 3 cups of water at a time, compared with more than 7 cups for the rest — that we didn’t consider it a contender, especially at its price. Similarly, at more than double the price of the Oxo, it’s hard to justify the extra cost for the gooseneck model unless you truly adore how it looks. Unlike just about every other kettle, they don’t provide any sort of alert when they reach the desired temperature, which seems an odd exclusion.

$32 at Amazon

$56 save $24

$47 at Walmart

$40 at Amazon

$40 at Cosori

The Krups Cool Touch and Cosori Double-Wall Stainless Steel Electric Kettle are both good, lower-price basic kettles that are solid options if you want to spend less than the price of the Breville. We overall prefer using the Breville day-to-day, but these insulated models both do a good job. They simply don’t feel as pleasant to use.

Fellow’s boil-only Clyde Electric Kettle pours very well, but we found handling it to be cumbersome and awkward when it’s very full. The design, resembling a curling stone, may not appeal to all tastes or kitchen aesthetics.

We tried the Haden Dorset Electric Kettle with high hopes due to its integrated analog thermometer and cute, retro style. We found the over-the-lid handle awkward for pouring, and it got in the way of filling (a common problem with top handles); also, the thermometer probe made it difficult to get inside the kettle to clean it.

The variable-temperature version of our Breville simple kettle pick, the IQ Kettle, costs at least $50 more than our top pick and emits a loud beep for seemingly every function. Put the kettle on the base? Beep. Change the temp? Beep. Hit start? Beep. It gets old very quickly.

The Cuisinart PerfecTemp Cordless Electric Kettle is one of my favorite kettles, and mine is more than a decade old and still going strong. It’s a venerable adjustable kettle with good build quality, and it pours very well. But the unit we were sent for testing was substantially inaccurate in its temperature, averaging 4 degrees off target. This is notably more than any other kettle we tested. We reached out to Cuisinart to better understand the discrepancy, but we had not received a response by time of publication.

We appreciate the Cosori Electric Gooseneck Kettle as a lower-price adjustable-temperature model, but the handle is small and uncomfortable, and it’s more annoying to fill because of the small opening. Plus it was the only model to ship with styrofoam packing, which isn’t a huge deal, but less environmentally friendly than the competition.

The Cuisinart Digital Gooseneck Kettle looks fantastic, and is larger than most goosenecks at 1 liter. The matte black exterior feels very much like a Fellow product. But the Oxo’s extra speed is enough to make that model a better pick.

I’ve been writing product reviews for more than a decade, covering pets, cameras, fashion and just about everything else — but I hold a special place in my heart for tea. I currently have two cabinets of tea organized by type, at least five teapots, a variable-temperature teakettle, a Zojirushi hot water dispenser, a titanium backpacking gaiwan and more pu’erh cakes than I know what to do with. I’ve also tested dozens of electric kettles in the past decade, both personally and for professional reviews.

We generally recommend that people get a variable-temperature kettle because they’re more flexible in different situations than one that just boils. Most experts recommend that you make coffee with water at around 200 degrees Fahrenheit, and teas at a variety of temperatures depending on the type. More-delicate teas will quickly become bitter and taste bad if you use water that’s too hot for them.

Hot water will also instantly drop in temperature when it gets poured from the kettle into another vessel. Roth says that it’ll usually cool by 5 to 10 degrees, depending on what material the recipient vessel is made of. And while there are generally agreed-upon tea-brewing temperature ranges, the perfect temperature depends on the individual tea and your own tastes; some black teas might be delicate and require a cooler temp, and some oolongs might be able to take some more heat.

It doesn’t take much to boil water, and most kettles will get the water to temp in the same amount of time. Here are the elements in which an electric kettle distinguishes itself from a pot of water on the stove.

For standard-size kettles, we measured the time it took to bring 1.5 liters of water from 63 degrees Fahrenheit to boiling. For smaller, gooseneck kettles, we ran the same test with 750 milliliters.

For basic kettles that only boil water, we measured the water temperature 30 minutes after boiling to see how well insulated it was and if the water would still be hot if you didn’t get to it immediately.

For variable-temperature kettles, we tested how accurately the water temperature matched the desired temperature across all presets, where presets existed, and in other cases with a range of temperatures corresponding to a number of different tea types.

All kettles were tested for usability, comfort, stability, surface temperature, pouring quality and general user experience. We paid special attention to how well the handles were constructed and shaped; if the lids were easy to open, fill, and put your hand in to clean; and how easy it was to burn yourself on the sides of the kettle.

Tim Barribeau is a contributor to Buy Side from WSJ.

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The Best Electric Kettles for Tea, Coffee and More - Buy Side from WSJ