The Best Rice Cookers of 2020

After producing consistent and flavorful batches of brown rice, short grain white rice, and jasmine rice, this Zojirushi rice cooker came out on top. It’s the only rice cooker with side handles on the inner pan, which makes removing cooked rice easier and safer. It incorporates “fuzzy logic,” meaning the microchip in the rice cooker adjusts the temperature and cook time to make up for any mismeasured water to rice ratio.

The Zojirushi has convenient presets for most rice types that, when combined with the machine's "fuzzy logic," can turn out perfectly cooked brown rice, porridge, sushi rice and more. Its retractable power cord and plastic fold-down handle also make both transport and storage easy.

Although we love its presets, we found this cooker's control panel to be less than intuitive. To successfully select the proper menu option and start cooking, we had to hold the rice cooker still with one hand and press hard to get it to respond. However, this minor inconvenience didn't discourage us from loving this Zojirushi, as it consistently made the best quality rice in our testing.

If you call yourself a rice snob, this is the tool for you. Equipped with induction heating technology, the Zojirushi Induction Rice Cooker is the next step up from fuzzy logic. Unlike electric rice cookers that heat solely from the bottom coil, this induction cooker heats the interior pan using a magnetic field, converting the entire pan into a heat source—which guarantees evenly cooked rice in every batch.

In our testing, we were impressed not only by how fluffy the brown and jasmine rice turned out, but also delighted by the slightly umami-flavored short grain white rice. Like other Zojirushi rice cookers, this machine allows you to adjust the texture of the rice to soft, medium or hard. It also opens smoothly without bouncing back, which is more than we can say for other cookers we tested. It makes cooking rice safer because the top lid won’t swing back and forth. The easy-to-press menu panel is also an upgrade from average rice cookers.

The rice cooker’s detachable inner lid makes for easy cleaning. We did find that some users have complaints about how long it takes to work—55 minutes for white rice and 60 minutes for brown rice (in comparison, the fastest rice cooker we tested takes about 30 minutes to cook a batch of short grain white rice). But every Zojirushi model we tested has a “Quick Cook” function for users who are in a rush to get their rice ready. The quality of the cooked rice is slightly inferior, but overall it’s not a bad feature to have. If you have the money, this is an excellent upgrade—it just doesn't balance features and price as well as our best overall.

Intrigued? Read our full review of the Zojirushi NP-HCC18XH rice cooker.

If consistency is your primary concern when making rice, the Panasonic Fuzzy Rice Cooker can get the job done. I used this rice cooker in my own home for eight years—the rice always came out fluffy yet soft and never overdone. Though this rice cooker takes longer to work than some might like (about 50 to 55 minutes), the final product is worth the wait.

Using this rice cooker is also incredibly easy. It has only four buttons, all clearly labeled, which makes cooking a simple process. Though this rice cooker made great rice and steamed fantastic dumplings with very little effort on our part, we didn’t like the design of the steam basket—it tended to leak into the rice if both sections were cooking simultaneously. For people who are interested in making just plain white rice on a regular basis and still want to stay on budget, this is a good choice.

Similar to other Zojirushi rice cookers we tested, the Zojirushi Micom rice cooker also incorporates advanced fuzzy logic to enhance the texture and flavor of cooked rice. Its triple-heating system with an extra large heater will turn uncooked brown, white, quinoa, and even steel cut oatmeal into perfectly cooked, fluffy grains. This Zojirushi also features a Cake preset that heats at a higher temperature for a slightly long time, ideal for baking a soft, Japanese cheesecake.

What knocked it down a few spots on our ranking is its capacity. Although it can handle three cups of uncooked rice, it’s smaller than other rice cookers we tested—one batch won’t feed a crowd.

This Cuckoo cooker consistently nailed the three rice cooking tasks we threw at it. It was the fastest to steam high quality brown and white rice. However, it isn’t without flaws. The control panel is too complicated for new users who aren’t familiar with more advanced rice cookers and the manual isn’t helpful enough. When we looked at the safety features, we found the top lid to be too loose and it kept bouncing backwards upon opening. Unfortunately, the top steam vent also tends to bubble and leak rice water when cooking.

You may not be familiar with the Tiger brand, but they’re a household name in Japan. This rice cooker features presets for brown and white rice, as well as for porridge, slow cooking, and oatmeal. Thanks to its brilliant steam basket design, users can steam their food and cook rice at same time without worrying about the steamer leaking into the rice, which happens quite often with traditional steam baskets in rice cookers. However, this rice cooker takes up much more space than other rice cookers with similar features.

This Midea has the features of a high-end rice cooker—steam, slow cook, and presets for different types of rice—but with a much friendlier price tag. In the short grain white rice tests, the top part was cooked through, but the bottom had lightly browned spots, which means heating was uneven.

Unfortunately, the Midea didn’t excel in brown rice testing either, as the bottom got sticky and made it difficult to remove the residue bits. Like other high-end rice cookers, the Midea can alert you when the rice is done. Ultimately, it gets the job done but lacks the precision and sophistication needed to make quality rice.

We like this Tiger because of its simplicity. Measure the rice and water, close the lid, and hit the Start button. In half an hour or so, the rice will be ready. We also appreciate the “synchro-cooking” function, which means it can cook the rice and main dish at the same time. In the past, we tried steaming vegetables while cooking rice in the Panasonic, but the juices from vegetables kept on dripping through the holes in the steam basket, which gave the rice a funny taste. This Tiger steam basket is useful because the steam holes are on the sides, so there’s no leakage when two dishes are cooked at the same time.

However, we didn’t like how much space it takes on the countertop. It’s oddly tall and bulky, which also makes storing this cooker a challenge. Overall, it’s a rice cooker that can make decent white rice, but it doesn't have the useful presets seen in the more advanced rice cookers that we tested.

The Aroma Digital Rice Cooker packs a big punch for a small footprint. It looks sort of like a tiny Instant Pot, but with more focused features. And while it didn't make perfect rice every single time, it came pretty close (one test out of five came out spottily cooked). It's useful for steaming dumplings, too.

It might feel a tad rickety compared to higher-priced models, but the results are okay, the price is low, and the machine is downright easy to use. Our only significant qualm: there's no way to tell how much time is left before the rice is done. This is a minor annoyance if you’re only an occasional rice devotee, but if you make rice every day, you'll want to invest in a better model.

If you’re the type of person who throws all of your laundry—sheets, towels, fancy clothes, and jeans—into the wash together, this might be the rice cooker for you. Its super simple setup means tossing rice and water in, pushing a lever, and waiting for the lever to pop back up. You never really know if you’re making rice correctly, but you just have to trust it will work. Luckily, the rice always turned out okay during testing, and it can steam dumplings, though we had to guess when the dumplings were done.

This cooker is compact, comes with a steamer bowl, and won’t break the bank. If you want a simple, old-school rice cooker that does the job alright, then you may consider this Oster.

The Hamilton Beach rice cooker feels like a pressure cooker missing a bunch of functions. It's larger than a rice cooker really needs to be, and during testing it had trouble cooking a single cup of rice without overcooking the bottom in some areas. The rice it produced was okay, but not stellar, and had a tendency to stick to the bottom of the pot.

The one truly awesome thing about this rice cooker is that its steaming basket can double as a colander for rinsing your rice, which means that the Hamilton Beach is more of a “complete package” than some of the other cookers.

At first glance, we almost mistook for an Instant Pot multicooker. It looks strikingly similar to a pressure cooker, except the presets on the control panel are different than on a typical one. The presets lean heavy on rice and grain cooking, but they still include slow cooking and other useful Instant Pot features.

However, this is the only rice cooker we tested that doesn’t have a detachable inner lid, which made cleaning difficult. In our testing, we found the rice tended to be mushy and overcooked, regardless of the grain size and type. Unless you're making quinoa, couscous, barley, and bulgur on a regular basis, we don't recommend buying this Instant Pot rice cooker.

We were first intrigued by this Dash cooker’s size—it’s tiny and compact, which makes it appealing to students and young professionals who don’t have the space for a large rice cooker. However, we were disappointed by its performance in our testing. It claims to be able to cook two cups of uncooked rice, but when we cooked one cup of short grain white rice in our testing, there weren’t any safety measures to stop the water from overflowing when boiling. We had to unplug the rice cooker to stop the water from coming out, and it made a huge mess. Ultimately, we don’t recommend this rice cooker because how poorly it performed.