Buying guide · lattes & cappuccinos
If nearly every drink you make has milk in it, the steam side of the machine matters more than the brew side, and the first decision is whether you want to texture the milk yourself or never think about it again.
There are two completely different products on this page and they both make a cappuccino. One gives you a steam wand and expects you to learn to texture milk, which takes a few weeks and then produces café-quality microfoam you can pour art with. The other takes a carafe of cold milk, does the whole thing at one button press, and never gets any better than it was on day one.
Neither is the correct answer. The question is whether making the coffee is part of the pleasure or an obstacle between you and the coffee, and people are usually very clear about which camp they are in once the question is put that way.
What both camps should care about is cleaning. Milk protein in a warm tube is the fastest way to ruin a machine and the cup that comes out of it, so how easily the milk path comes apart is a spec worth more than most of the numbers on the box.
The picks
The automatic wand hits a set temperature and texture on its own, which gets you a genuinely pourable microfoam from the first week, and you can switch it to manual once your ear catches up. That combination is rare: most machines make you choose between a wand that does it for you and a wand you can learn on. Budget for a grinder, because there is not one in the box.
The LatteCrema carafe makes a genuinely good milk drink at one press and then detaches and goes in the fridge with the milk still inside, which is the part that decides whether an automatic milk system gets cleaned or gets neglected. For a household that drinks milky coffee on weekday mornings and has no interest in technique, this is the machine.
Two separate carafes, one for hot milk and one for cold, and a menu of one-touch drinks long enough that nobody has to learn anything to get what they want. It is the most machine here and the most to clean, and it earns that if your kitchen produces four different coffee orders before nine in the morning.
The shortlist
| # | Machine | Milk | Ease | Editor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Breville Bambino Plus Semi-Automatic | 9 | 9 | 7.5 |
| 02 | Breville Dual Boiler BES920XL Semi-Automatic | 9 | 6 | 7.9 |
| 03 | Jura E8 Super-Automatic | 8 | 9 | 6.9 |
| 04 | De'Longhi Magnifica Evo Super-Automatic | 8 | 9 | 6.7 |
| 05 | De'Longhi Eletta Explore Super-Automatic | 8 | 9 | 6.5 |
| 06 | Breville Barista Express Impress Semi-Automatic | 7 | 8 | 7.7 |
How to choose
A manual wand gives you the highest ceiling and a learning curve measured in weeks. An automatic wand texturing to a set temperature gets you most of the way there immediately, and some can be switched to manual later, which is the best of both. A carafe system pulls milk through a tube and delivers a finished drink: the lowest effort, the lowest ceiling, and the most cleaning discipline required.
Home machines with a single boiler share heat between brewing and steaming, so the steam is softer and texturing takes longer, which gives bubbles time to form. A dedicated steam boiler or a machine that heats fast enough to switch without waiting is what produces that dense, glossy microfoam. It is also the main thing you pay for as you go up in price.
Count the parts. A two-piece carafe that goes in the dishwasher gets rinsed every day; a system with internal tubes and a cleaning cycle gets skipped, and skipped milk systems turn sour and eventually block. If you are choosing between two automatic machines, pick the one whose milk path comes apart in your hand in under a minute.
Overheated milk tastes thin and faintly of cardboard because the sugars break down, and most beginners overheat by a wide margin. Anything that ends texturing at a set temperature, automatically, fixes the single most common fault in home milk drinks. If you are texturing manually, a cheap stick-on thermometer teaches you the feel faster than anything else.
A pitcher much larger than the drink gives you a pool of foam you cannot control, and one too small overflows while you are still stretching. One pitcher sized for your usual cup will improve your milk more than the next machine up will, and it costs almost nothing.
Then this ranking is actively misleading for you, because it weights the milk system at three times the shot. Read the guide for learning properly, where the weighting is the other way round and the machines that win are the ones with the most control over extraction.
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