Best soup maker 2024: for smooth soups and chunky broths

Soups season has arrived, and the best soup makers will turn out perfectly creamy concoctions to make your winter lunching a whole lot easier.

These appliances can turn raw ingredients into steaming hot soups in just over 10 minutes, and with these fantastic picks from Ninja, Drew & Cole, Morphy Richards, and Salter that we've tested, there's no shortage of options.

Each and every one of the six best soup makers in our guide have been reviewed hands-on by our expert testing team. We made all sorts of soups, from leek and potato to curried root vegetable, and took into account how easy the soup makers were to clean and to store.

A couple of the best soup makers in our guide are two-in-one alternatives to the best blenders, with heating elements to make hot and spicy sauces, and regular modes for icy milkshakes. While they can't go through the dishwasher because of the in-built heating element, they often come with settings for self-cleaning that will reach even the trickiest corners of the jug to remove any leftovers. Then, all you'll need to do is rinse out the sudsy residue.

Other things we loved in the best soup makers included clear designs to watch your soup as it cooks and blends, and modes to keep your soup warm after it's cooked, so you'll be able to enjoy a bowl as soon as you're ready.

The quick list

Best soup makers 2024 - tested by our team

Best soup maker overall

We put this soup maker to the test to see how it measures up against blenders, and it's one of the best we've tried. The jug is made of sturdy glass that can withstand heat even for prolonged periods of time. The display shows a countdown timer, and the blades can even chop and saute your onion and garlic before adding the rest of your ingredients.

The chunky mode was particularly good for fresh vegetables, and we were really impressed by the smoothness of our butternut squash soup, especially when we used it to blend nuts and halved carrots from raw.

Soup makers can make a great pasta sauce, or a topping for your curry, but it's nice to have the option of a model with a fully dedicated sauce mode. The self-clean setting is very effective, and if you're wondering, it also functions very well as a blender for making milkshakes and smoothies.

Our Ninja Foodi Blender and Soup Maker review has the full details.

Best soup maker for delayed starts

If you like the sound of coming home to a fresh cooked soup that you prepared before you left home, the Drew & Cole Soup Chef Pro is the best soup maker for you. It’s easy to delay the start by 30-minute intervals up to 12 hours, and the smooth cooking mode takes just 19 minutes. There’s also a smooth+ setting for seriously velvety soups, but even on the regular setting, we had zero issues with lumps or grainy ingredients. Everything was perfectly silky and cooked just how we like it.

Another major perk is the saute setting, which is on the handle of the soup maker. You can sear your onions or garlic using this mode before adding stock and starting the blending setting. For the quality of the design, we also think it comes at a great price.

Best soup maker with a clear jug

The Morphy Richards Clarity Soup Maker warns you that ingredients could stick to the bottom when cooking, but we had no issues with this when making our soups in it. Straight out of the box, it’s very easy to assemble. We were surprised to find that the jug is not glass, but felt like plastic. In fact, it is tritan, which is a very durable but lightweight material free from BPA.

The smooth soup setting is only 22 minutes, which means you can set your soup up to cook and finish your bowl within the same lunch break. Cooking was very speedy, and the ingredients were simmering within five minutes of us turning it on. The controls at the top are straightforward to use, and there is one for smooth, chunky, and smoothie, and clean. The quality of the blending was great, and it also has a keep warm function that kept our soup perfect for drinking after it had finished blending.

Best high-end soup maker

The Lakeland Touchscreen Soup & Smoothie Maker is by far the most premium-looking option we tested. It has a price tag to match, though, so if you drink a lot of soup then it will be a great investment.

With a modern design and a blender-like jug, it has modes for smooth and chunky soups as well as sauces and even iced drinks. We really enjoyed the control panel, which made the process very easy, and the timer also helped to know when to add any extras. We were able to add cream to our tomato soup once the blending started thanks to a removable lid insert. If you want an extra smooth finish you can also just blend without heating once your soup has finished. The auto-clean function was also very effective.

Best soup maker for extra functions

The Judge Soup Maker has a capacity of 1.7 litres, but if you’re making soup it will only take up to 1.2 litres. We found that it heated up very fast, and because the jug is plastic and see-through it’s possible to watch your soup as it cooks.

We enjoyed the powerful blending modes which left us with a very smooth soup, and because it’s got a classic blender-style design you can also use the Judge Soup Maker to make chilled drinks. The removable cap allows you to add ingredients while it’s cooking, but we did find that the lid was sometimes tricky to lock into place.

Best value soup maker

Salter’s soup maker is the most budget-friendly option in our guide, and it’s a trusted choice to make either chunky or smooth soups. You are warned that ingredients can burn to the bottom before use, and a good way to fix this is to add some oil to prevent sticking, but we still found that there was a little burning after our soup was finished.

There are two soup modes: smooth, chunky, and one for blending or self-cleaning. The self-clean mode is very effective at removing residue from the blending blade. We also liked using the blend setting to add an extra blitz for soups we wanted a little smoother.

How we tested the best soup makers

As part of our commitment at Ideal Home to how we test, all of the soup makers featured here have been tested either at home or at our test facility, so that we can tell you exactly what we think before you spend your money.

Soup makers can be used to make all types of different soups, including chunky, smooth, and even gazpacho. When testing the best soup makers we cooked a variety of recipes to make sure they were all up to the task of making even tricky soups. Some classics, like butternut squash or leek and potato, will blend very easily into velvety smooth soups, whereas others like pea soup or broccoli and stilton, will need to be very well cooked and blended to achieve the consistency you’re after.

We also made a lot of tomato soup using tomatoes and red peppers to see if the skin would pose a challenge to the cooking and blending, and while we used the same recipes, it was amazing to see the slight (or sometimes not-so-slight) differences that arose between different soup makers upon testing.

Below you can read more about exactly who tested these soup makers, and their soup-making credentials.

FAQs