We tested a range of portable, wood- and gas- fired pizza ovens, teaming up with our colleagues at BBC Good Food to ensure our tests were as accurate, fair and useful as possible. With their culinary knowledge and our reviewing expertise we’ve found the best pizza ovens for every garden.
Each review has a detailed list of pros and cons for clarity and has been rated according to ease of use, handling, performance and value for money. We’ve tested a range of pizza ovens, but only seven standout appliances have made our list, so you can buy with confidence.
A domestic pizza oven is a small, individual pizza-sized oven that sits on a small stand or a garden table.
For extra help with pizzas, take a look at BBC Good Food’s recipes for easy margheritas, pizza dough, and pizza sauce. If you’re entertaining, check out our tests of the best charcoal barbecues and the best gas barbecues, also in collaboration with BBC Good Food. To get your patio ready for guests, take a look at our tests of the best solar lights, or our guides to outdoor furniture, parasols, and hammocks.
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How does a pizza oven work?
A domestic pizza oven is a small oven that sits on a stand or a garden table and cooks traditional pizza.
There are three main fuels for a pizza oven. The first is wood, usually wood pellets, which give an authentic flame-cooked taste. Make sure your wood is food-grade, so you don’t cook with toxic fuels, and keep an eye out for FSC-sourced wood pellets, which are more sustainable than other wood fuel. If your oven runs on wood pellets you can also use charcoal – unlike the larger briquettes you use to light a charcoal barbecue, this is small chips of lumpwood. Propane gas is another source and the same gas you would use to fuel a gas barbecue. Available in canisters, it’s attached to the oven by a regulator. Wood and gas take about the same time to heat up – the shape of the pizza oven makes the difference here. Wood pellets do give a smokier taste, however. Finally, you can also buy barbecue-top pizza ovens that use the heat of a charcoal or gas barbecue to cook your pizza.
What’s in the box?
The most basic pizza ovens will come in two parts – the main body of the oven, and the pizza stone, which is what your pizza cooks on. A good pizza oven should come with a few extras included. The most important is a pizza peel, which is the little metal paddle you use to insert your pizza into the oven. A good extra feature is a cover or carry case, to keep your oven dry and make it easier to move around and if you have a gas oven, make sure it comes with a regulator, which you’ll need to attach your oven to your gas. They’re often ready to use straight out of the box, but some models need more assembly than others.
There are three main types of pizza oven:
Portable pizza ovens
The classic domestic pizza oven, and the focus of our tests. They’re small enough to sit on a garden table while you cook and to store in a shed, and should be light enough to move around the garden easily, as and when you need them. You might have heard of Ooni or Gozney, who make a wide range of ovens with a variety of features but they’re also increasingly available from DIY stores, supermarkets and online brands.
Barbecue-top pizza ovens
As basic as it gets. These handy stones or boxes sit on top of a grill and use the heat from your gas or charcoal barbecue to cook so you can turn out a pizza alongside burgers and sausages. However, because they mostly cook from the bottom up, they’re not as fast as other pizza ovens, and can be trickier to master. They usually don’t cook as well as classic portable or freestanding ovens, so we’ve stuck to portable pizza ovens in this article, but check out BBC Good Food’s review of the La Hacienda BBQ pizza oven for more information.
Freestanding pizza ovens
These permanent ovens are big and expensive. Think of the oven at the back of a pizzeria – a large oven designed to cook lots of pizza very quickly. They look impressive as a focal point on a patio or as part of an outdoor kitchen but they can cost you thousands of pounds.
A margherita pizza being put to the test
What can you cook in a pizza oven?
You aren’t limited to pizza. The high temperatures in a pizza oven are just the thing for quick homemade flatbreads like roti, naan, pitta and tortilla. You can also quickly cook nachos, jacket potatoes, melanzane, sea bass, and baked camembert. Nor are you limited to savoury foods – you can also have a go at cinnamon rolls or tarte tatin.
How much is a pizza oven?
Prices vary depending on the type of pizza oven. For the average-sized portable pizza oven, set aside £300-600. Barbecue-top pizza ovens will set you back £40-£100, and you’ll have to fork out £1,000-£2,000 for top-line freestanding pizza ovens.
BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine digital reviews writer, Alex David, and senior digital reviews writer, Cinead McTernan, preparing ingredients to test
How should I choose a pizza oven?
Bear in mind space, oven capacity, and cost. When it comes to oven capacity, couples probably won’t need a big 16-inch pizza oven, but if you’re frequently cooking for a bigger family a 12-inch oven might not cut it. If you love a true, flame-grilled taste, opt for a wood-fired oven, but if you have a garden in a terrace or semi-detached house, be mindful that the smoke might be an issue. Consider all of these, as well as your budget, and you’ll find the right oven for your space.
In every review we award outstanding products our coveted Best Buy award. To see these and the others we recommend, browse our pick of the best pizza ovens below.
Best pizza ovens on test in 2022
Best Buy pizza ovens
1
Dellonda Portable Wood-Fired 14-inch Pizza Oven
RRP: £179.98
Our rating: 4.75
Dellonda Portable Wood-Fired 14-inch Pizza Oven
Pros
- Fantastic value
- Long, safe handles
- Delicious pizza
- High quality parts
Cons
- Hot exterior
- Needs lots of fuel
- Short warranty
The Dellonda Portable Wood-Fired 14-inch Pizza Oven is a BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine Best Buy winner for the best value pizza oven, thanks to its low RRP and included pizza peel. This compact, stylish tabletop pizza oven is fuelled by charcoal or sustainable hardwood pellets and despite its remarkably low price it feels high-quality. The pizza peel offers space for a 12 inch pizza, and all the handles on the oven are long and wooden to keep your hands well away from hot metal. Though it’s a large pizza oven, the legs flip down and you could easily store the chimney inside. You can also buy this model with a storage case to keep it rust-free and take it on the go. It made delicious pizza with a well browned underside and golden, bubbled cheese. Crucially, it also created very little smoke, so this is a good oven to use if you live on a terrace and don’t want to annoy your neighbours.
Though it’s easy and safe to add fuel, thanks to the long handles, we found that the exterior of this pizza oven gets very hot. It took half an hour to cool down, and though the heat distribution is quite good it’s noticeably hotter on one side. We also discovered that this oven isn’t as efficient as others on test, as you need to keep it topped up with pellets throughout the entire cooking process. It also has a short warranty of only a year.
Buy the Dellonda Portable Wood-Fired 14-inch Pizza Oven from Amazon and Dellonda
2
Ooni Koda 16 Pizza Oven
RRP: £499.99
Our rating: 4.5 out of 5
Ooni Koda 16 Pizza Oven
Pros:
- Quick to assemble
- Huge capacity
- Perfect pizzas
- High quality materials
Cons:
- Need to pay extra for essential tools
Ooni is the most famous brand in the pizza oven industry, and the Koda 16 wins a BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine Best Buy award for the best pizza oven for big families. This gas-powered pizza oven has an enormous capacity, which means you can cook a whopping dustbin lid pizza of up to 16 inches. Despite this size we cooked a simple margherita in just 60 seconds. This is thanks to the unique L-shaped flame, which covers the whole pizza and makes for the best pizza on test – a perfect pizza with charred bubbles in the crust, and wonderfully golden mozzarella. It’s incredibly easy to use and is ready to light in just five minutes out of the box. Once you attach the oven to your gas source it’s as quick and easy to use as switching on a hob, and you can precisely control the temperature, which can reach a blistering 500 Celsius after 20 minutes. If you register your oven with Ooni you can get a three-year warranty, too.
However, we have two quibbles with the design. The first is that this pizza oven has a relatively shallow opening, which is fine for pizza but you could struggle with other dishes. The second is that there’s no thermometer on the pizza oven itself. Also, bear in mind that not only is this oven expensive, but you will need to pay extra for any accessories such as a pizza peel, thermometer and cover.
Buy the Ooni Koda 16 from Ooni, Lakeland, John Lewis, and Selfridges
3
Ooni Karu 16 Pizza Oven
RRP: £699
Our rating: 4.5/5
Ooni Karu 16 Pizza Oven
Pros:
- 16-inch” capacity
- Quick to assemble
- Digital thermometer
- Glass door
- High quality materials
Cons:
- Price
- Need to pay extra for essential tools
Ooni’s newest offering is the Karu 16, which has similar features to the Koda 16 while fixing some of the problems outlined above. Awarded a BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine Best Buy for the best premium pizza oven, the Karu 16 cooks 16-inch pizzas in just 60 seconds and runs off wood fuel. It can also be fuelled by gas if you buy the gas burner. Simple to light, it reaches cooking temperature in 15 minutes compared to the 25 minutes we found for the Koda 16. It has several marked improvements from its predecessor. Unlike the Koda 16, it has a digital thermometer, so you can cook remarkably precisely, as well as a tall glass door, so it’s easy to add your pizza and see exactly how it’s cooking. Like the Koda 16, the Karu 16 cooks some of the best pizza on test, creating beautiful, mottled pizza. You get what you pay for with this model – it is better than the Koda 16 but obviously costs more y. And as with all Ooni models, it doesn’t come with accessories, such as a pizza peel, which you’ll have to buy as an extra.
Buy the Ooni Karu 16 from Ooni, Lakeland, John Lewis, and Amazon
4
Ooni Koda 12 Pizza Oven
RRP: £299.99
Our rating: 4.5 out of 5
Ooni Koda 12 Pizza Oven
Pros:
- Lightweight
- Portable
- Collapsible legs
- Good price
Cons:
- Tricky to turn pizza
- Need to pay extra for essential tools
If the 16-inch pizza capacity offered by the Koda 16 is over-kill, check out its smaller, less expensive sibling. A BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine Best Buy winner for the best pizza oven for couples, we found that the gas-powered Koda 12 has the same advantages as the 16, but in a more compact appliance. It’s easy to set up and use, just flip out the legs and attach the pizza stone and gas canister. The heat control dial means it’s easy to control, and the flame burner that runs along the back of the oven makes for delicious, flame-cooked picture-perfect pizzas. For £200 less than the 16, it’s worth considering if you aren’t feeding a crowd. However, the caveats of the Koda 16 apply here, too. There’s no thermometer on this oven, and you’ll have to shell out extra for the essential pizza peel. We also found that because it’s smaller than the Koda 16, it’s a little harder to put your pizza in and turn it so that it cooks evenly.
Buy the Ooni Koda 12 from Ooni, Lakeland, John Lewis, and Selfridges
5
Gozney Roccbox Pizza Oven
RRP: £399
Our rating: 4.25/5
Gozney Roccbox Pizza Oven
Pros:
- Easy set-up
- Excellent pizza
- Five-year warranty
- Safe – cool to the touch
- High quality materials
Cons:
If you’re new to homemade pizza, this BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine Best Buy winner is ideal for beginners as it’s ready to go straight from the box. It’s utterly foolproof, hitting temperature in 20 minutes and it has an inbuilt thermometer so you always know if you’re at the right temperature. Anyone can achieve a truly restaurant-quality pizza. The matte silicon shell means the exterior is a lot cooler than other ovens here, so it’s safer too. If you want a wood-fired pizza, you can also buy this pizza oven as a dual-fuel version, giving you the option of cooking with either gas or wood fuel. We love the remarkably high-quality materials of this oven, and the generous five-year warranty, plus it comes with a pizza peel included.
However, bear in mind that this is a pretty hefty oven. Weighing in at 20kg it’s not particularly portable, though Gozney claims it is. Price-wise it sits towards the more expensive end of the market for tabletop ovens, and it has quite a small oven space for the size – athough it has a larger footprint than the Koda 12 it only cooks pizzas up to 12 inches.
Buy the Gozney Roccbox from Gozney
The best of the rest
Although some models didn’t quite achieve a BBC Gardeners’ World Magazine Best Buy award, they still have great features that make them worth recommending. Browse our pick of the best of the rest on test.
6
Igneus Classico Pizza Oven
RRP: £875
Our rating: 4/5
Igneus Classico Pizza Oven
Pros:
- Large cooking area
- Cooks two pizzas at once
- Thermometer included
- High quality materials
Cons:
- Price
- Warranty
- Essentials not included
With a whopping 24 x 24-inch internal area, this beast will tackle two 12-inch pizzas at once. The BBC Good Food team reckon that you could even cook an entire roast in the Igneus Classico, so if you’re getting the whole clan together for a family reunion, this is the oven for you. It’s high-quality, and has an inbuilt thermometer marked with the perfect temperature range of 350°C to 410°C, so you’ll always know if you’re at the right temperature for your pizza. It made beautiful pizzas, and it’s easy to insert, turn, and remove them thanks to the roomy capacity.
However, this is a very big appliance. With all four of the pizza stones loaded it comes in at a weighty 45kg. It’s also one of the most expensive pizza ovens we tested, and the most expensive in this article. Despite this big price, it only has a year’s warranty, and like the Ooni products featured in this article, it doesn’t come with essential accessories like a pizza peel.
Buy the Igneus Classico from Igneus
7
Fresh Grills Premium Pizza Oven
RRP: £299.99
Our rating: 4/5
Fresh Grills Premium Pizza Oven
Pros:
- Good for storage
- Long handles
- Includes peel and case
Cons:
- Needs lots of fuel
- Logo cutout lets out some of the heat
- Slow to heat
- Poorly designed door
The Fresh Grills Premium Pizza Oven is just right for new pizzaiolos to entertain. Though it has a big footprint, this oven is excellent for storage. The legs are foldable and the chimney is removable for easy storage in winter. It sits high off the table, which is a good safety feature to avoid injuries. The handles are long, to keep you safe from hot metal, and it also comes with a convenient carry case and pizza peel. We loved that it produces very little smoke and it made some of the tastiest pizzas on test. It has a two-year warranty.
However, we found that there were a few drawbacks in the design. We found a lip in the door where you could easily snag your wrist, and the screws to attach the handle and thermometer stick through the back of the door, so you could catch yourself on those, too. The logo on the door is cut-out, rather than printed. While it looks fantastic to see the flames flickering through the logo, it lets a lot of heat out – this grill took 45 minutes to get to temperature and needed a lot of fuel. This cut-out logo is also on the pizza peel, and we found that delicate dough could snag on this, too.
Buy the Fresh Grills Premium Pizza Oven from Amazon and The Range
How we tested pizza ovens
We tested a range of portable pizza ovens, fuelled by gas and wood. Using BBC Good Food’s basic pizza dough recipe on test and the manufacturers’ instructions, we built and used each oven exactly as you would in your garden. We also tested with different pizza recipes where oven capacity allowed for this.
The ovens were assessed according to the following criteria with equal marks attributed to each:
- Assembly and storage: Looked at the ease of assembly and clarity of instructions and how long it took to build the oven. We also noted any storage features and how easy it was to pack up and put away.
- Ease of use: Pizzas require incredibly high temperatures to cook so we looked for excellent insulation and safety features to make the pizza oven easy to use. We assessed how quickly we could get cooking, how easy it was to add and control fuel and how quickly the oven cooled down. We also looked at the portability of the ovens.
- Cooking results: The ultimate criteria, this assessed the look, texture, and taste of the pizzas.
- Value for money: Considered all of the above, including quality, design, any special features, plus RRP and warranty.
This review was last updated in July 2022. We apologise if anything has changed in price or availability.