Breville Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro vs Cuisinart TOA-70 Air Fryer Oven and Grill

The Breville Joule's autopilot function isn't a gimmick — it literally cycles through 13 cooking modes in sequence to produce results like rotisserie-style chicken that you physically cannot replicate by manually managing a single cooking mode. The Cuisinart has no equivalent. It's a well-engineered appliance with analog dials; the Joule is closer to a programmable sous vide setup for dry heat. If you never cook anything that benefits from multi-stage cooking, you're paying $300 for features you'll ignore.

WIRED tested both and called the Cuisinart's air frying the crispiest they'd seen on any non-basket air fryer. That's a meaningful distinction. The Breville Joule air fries well, but the Cuisinart was purpose-built around this use case and it shows in the results. If wings and fries are why you're buying a toaster oven, the cheaper machine wins this specific fight.

The Cuisinart's ridged grill plate is a genuinely underrated feature that no other toaster oven in this category offers. It produces real char marks and Maillard browning on meat and vegetables — something the Breville Joule, for all its sophistication, simply cannot do. WIRED specifically called it out as a feature that should be standard across the category. If you live in an apartment and miss grilling, this matters more than any smart feature.

The Breville Joule costs between $464 and $550. The Cuisinart runs $160 to $220. That $300 difference buys a lot of groceries, and for most households the Cuisinart covers 80% of real-world use cases — air frying, toasting, baking — without the premium. The Joule earns its price if you cook seriously and frequently, but it's a hard sell if your primary use is weeknight wings and frozen fries.