Best Drip Coffee Makers of 2025
Consumer Reports’ engineers tested nearly 100 drip-style coffee makers to find the best for your daily brew
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Whether you crave a cup of coffee on the spot or a steaming, just-brewed pot when you wake up each morning, it’s hard to beat the convenience of a drip coffee maker. A good one will brew coffee within the optimal temperature range to extract the best flavor from the grounds, keep the coffee hot, and not make a mess on your counter. It should also be intuitive to operate and easy to clean.
To find out which coffee makers perform best, Consumer Reports has rigorously tested almost 150 coffee makers (nearly a hundred of which are drip-style) within a wide price range. Some models our engineers test come with bells and whistles that can add to the cost of a coffee maker, but which you might not necessarily need.
“In general, for a higher price, you can get add-ons like a water filter, clean cycle, clean indicator, permanent filter, or thermal carafe,” says CR test engineer Ginny Lui.
CR members can click on each model name below to learn about its features and scores for each of our tested criteria. For more, check out CR’s comprehensive drip coffee maker ratings. To explore even more options, check out our full coffee maker ratings, which include drip coffee makers, single-serve (pod) coffee makers, dual coffee-makers, cold-brew coffee makers, and more. See our coffee maker buying guide for smart shopping tips.
Traditional Drip Coffee Makers
With automatic drip coffee machines, you fill a chamber with water, put coffee into a filter basket, and flip a switch to heat the water and run it through the grounds and into the pot.
The Bunn HB Heat N Brew Programmable receives strong marks across the board in our performance tests. But its features are a bit bare bones. While it has auto-shutoff, a cleaning indicator, and programming, it lacks features like a brew-strength selector or a small-batch setting, despite its relatively high price. Still, you’re likely to love this machine. Bunn drip coffee makers have earned an excellent reputation for owner satisfaction and are more reliable than most, according to data from our latest member surveys. Its unusual design moves all the brewing mechanisms above the glass carafe.
A conventional drip coffee maker with a modern twist, the Cuisinart DCC-T20 Touchscreen 14-Cup Programmable offers slick touchscreen controls and makes plenty of java for a full house, thanks to its 14-cup glass carafe. This model shines when it comes to brewing performance and convenience in our tests. In addition to more standard features like programming, auto-shutoff, a cleaning indicator, and a permanent filter, it has less common perks like a water filter, brew-strength control, and a small-batch setting. It’s a bit pricey, but for the investment, you can count on an all-around great coffee maker for busy mornings and dinner parties.
If you want a basic glass-carafe drip coffee maker, you can’t do much better than the large-volume Cuisinart PerfecTemp 14 Cup Programmable DCC-3200, one of the highest-ranking models in CR’s tests. This 14-cup machine earns an excellent rating for brew performance, reflecting optimal brewing temperature and coffee intensity. It can be programmed to have fresh coffee waiting when you wake up, and it lets you adjust the brewing strength to make weaker or stronger coffee.
The uniquely designed Cuisinart Programmable DCC-4000 offers the same top-tier brewing experience as other models in this line, complete with an attractive warming base that holds a 12-cup glass carafe and an exposed water reservoir to easily determine when refilling is necessary. You can program the machine to brew one to four cups of coffee of varying strength within a 24-hour period; plus, there’s an auto-shutoff feature, automatic cleaning, and completion alerts. This coffee maker also fetches solid marks in our convenience and carafe handling tests.
The Haden 14-cup coffee maker is striking to look at, with your choice of copper or chrome flourishes to highlight the machine’s basic black or white coloring, respectively. It demonstrated excellent brew performance—which takes just about 9 minutes—and our testers liked its carafe handling. Plus, it did very well in our convenience tests.
The R.W. Flame coffee maker receives the top score in our brew test, and our testers found the machine pretty easy to operate and clean, and the glass carafe extremely simple to handle. In addition to the typical drip coffee machine features like auto-shutoff and a permanent cone-type coffee filter, the appliance automatically pauses if you want to grab a cup of coffee before the batch is completed brewing, a nice touch if you’re on the go.
Grind-and-Brew Drip Coffee Makers
Grind-and-brew drip coffee makers do exactly as the name says: They grind whole coffee beans before brewing you a mean cup of coffee.
The Cuisinart Next-Generation Burr Grind & Brew 12-cup DGB-800 grinds whole coffee beans immediately before brewing for an especially fresh-tasting cup of coffee. It comes with a permanent filter, a water filter, auto-shutoff, programming, and brew-strength control. It isn’t the most intuitive to use and clean, but the carafe is easy to handle, even when it’s full. Cuisinart drip coffee brewers are among the best for owner satisfaction, and their owners considered them plenty reliable in CR’s latest member survey.
The 10-cup GE Profile Smart Grind & Brew coffee maker’s small batch setting and brew strength controls allow you to tailor your brew to your taste. It comes with a removable reservoir, a permanent filter, a thermal carafe, and a handy indicator that lets you know when the machine needs to be cleaned. Plus, it earned very good results across the board in our brew performance, convenience, and carafe handling evaluations.
Like the Cuisinart, the Melitta Aroma Fresh Plus 10-Cup takes whole coffee beans and grinds them fresh for each pot, turning out a consistently hot, fresh cup of joe in just about 11 minutes. Testers found the Melitta especially convenient to use, based on their judgment of setup, operation, and cleanup—plus, the Melitta’s carafe was really simple to hold, pour from, and empty. The Melitta comes with auto-shutoff and an indicator to tell you when cleaning is needed, too.
Single-Serve Drip Coffee Makers
Single-serve drip coffee makers are designed to produce just one or two cups at a time and sometimes brew directly into an insulated mug that can be taken with you in the car or on the train.
If you need only one or two cups of coffee each morning and don’t want a pod coffee maker, consider the compact and sleek Technivorm Moccamaster Cup-One Brewer. Technivorm is one of the few drip machine brands with the best possible predicted reliability and owner satisfaction scores in our member surveys. Our testers were impressed by this model’s brewing performance. It has only one simple feature (auto-shutoff), and it’s not the easiest to use, but you can count on it to last.
Self-Serve Drip Coffeemakers
Instead of brewing coffee into a carafe, a self-serve drip coffee maker brews coffee that’s kept hot in a reservoir inside the machine. That means there’s no need to lift a carafe every time you want a cup. Instead, you dispense it with the push of a button.
The Cuisinart Coffee on Demand DCC-3000 is a self-serve coffee maker that aced our brew performance test, meaning it maintained optimal brewing temperature for the best coffee concentration. It receives a very good score for convenience, so it’s fairly easy to fill the reservoir, install the coffee filter, gauge how much coffee’s left, and clean up. Plus, Cuisinart has an excellent score for owner satisfaction; owners of the brand’s drip coffee makers are likely to recommend theirs to friends and family, according to our member surveys.
How CR Tests Drip Coffee Makers
In CR’s lab, each drip coffee maker we rate brews roughly 65 cups by the time our engineers are through with it. Our brew-performance tests measure the brew temperature and contact time—how long water stays within the sweet spot of 195° F to 205° F, for optimal flavor extraction. We determine concentration using a refractometer, a device that measures the amount of coffee dissolved in each brew. And our convenience tests look at how easy it is to set timers, fill the reservoir, clean the machine, and more. We also incorporate data for predicted reliability and owner satisfaction using survey results collected from thousands of CR members.
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