Blender Face-Off: Ninja vs. Vitamix

Ninja: The Ninja Professional Plus Kitchen System BN801 is a 1,400-watt blender with a 9-cup plastic container and removable blade. The touchpad controls have five speeds and preset buttons for making smoothies, crushing ice, extracting nutrients, chopping, and creating up to 2 pounds of dough. It also has a pulse function, a useful feature when you need a quick boost of power to get the right consistency and texture for a smoothie, for example.

This blender features Ninja’s Auto-iQ technology, which automatically senses which jar is on the motor base and suggests presets to match.

The Ninja measures 18 inches high—a bit too high to fit under standard cabinetry on the counter. It has a one-year warranty and comes with a personal blender attachment, a food chopper attachment, a dough blade, and two 24-ounce cups with lids for taking smoothies on the go.

Vitamix: The 1,440-watt Vitamix 3500, which is part of the brand’s Ascent series, has a plastic jar that holds 8 cups (one less cup than the Ninja). At 17 inches tall, it’s slightly shorter than the Ninja, but that difference means it will fit under most kitchen cabinets.

You use a dial to choose one of 15 speeds, or you can pick a setting on the LCD touchscreen for smoothies, frozen desserts, dips, hot soups, or self-cleaning. Like the Ninja, this blender automatically adjusts its program settings and blending times to the container size you use, but as mentioned, you’ll get only the 8-cup jar with your purchase. There’s a compatible 8-ounce cup and a 20-ounce cup that you can purchase separately, and you’ll need an adapter to use them with the blender base. Starter kits that include an adapter and a cup cost $145; additional cups are $30.

This Vitamix has a programmable timer for custom recipes—you set the desired time and the blender will turn off automatically. The Ascent series also comes integrated with wireless connectivity so that you can download new programs and updates from its smartphone app. It’s available in black, white, stainless, graphite metal, copper, and red, and it has a generous 10-year warranty.

Icy drinks: To see how well blenders handle making smoothies, our testers whip up nonalcoholic piña coladas, then drain the blended mixture through assorted sieve sizes to check how many bits of fruit and ice remain after blending. Both blenders receive a top-notch rating here, serving up fruity drinks with a smooth, consistent texture. For this test, it’s a draw. You’ll get great margaritas no matter which blender you go with.

Puréeing: For this test, we blend raw ingredients into a puréed soup and pour it through a sieve to see how many chunks remain. Both blenders do an equally excellent job of puréeing parsley, carrots, and other firm vegetables into a slurpable soup. This test is another draw.

However, our testers found that the Vitamix’s fast-whirring blades also created enough friction to heat up cold, raw ingredients while blending, making hot soup instantly. When we tried it out, we got piping hot soup in 5 minutes. The Ninja? It’s a no-go: The manufacturer does not recommend using hot liquids in the blender, warns Larry Ciufo, who oversees CR’s blender testing. So if you love puréeing soups, you’ll be happier with the Vitamix.

Ice-crushing: We place seven ice cubes in each blender and pulverize them to see how uniform and fine the ice gets. The goal: small fine flakes, for which a blender receives an excellent rating. Well, neither the Vitamix nor the Ninja made the cut for the top rating. Still, they both earn our second-highest rating in this test, meaning the ice looks like what you’d see in a snow cone, with small uniform chips. That’s not bad, and it’s another draw between the two blenders.

Noise: Both models are noisy—as blenders tend to be—scoring middling ratings in that test. In fact, not a single one of the more than 80 full-sized models in our ratings nabs a top score for noise. It’s another tie between the two blenders, but we can hardly take them to task, considering none of the CR recommended models in our full-sized blender ratings fare any better.

Convenience: Our testers found both blenders to be pretty convenient in terms of how easy they are to clean, how easy it is to pour from the blender container, how clear the controls and markings on the jar are to read, and the weight of the jar. The Ninja comes out slightly on top with an outstanding rating, and the Vitamix trails just behind with a very good rating—our testers found the markings on the Vitamix jar to be a bit challenging to read.

Reliability and owner satisfaction: Vitamix earns a top-level rating for reliability in CR’s annual member survey; Ninja isn’t far behind, receiving a very good reliability rating. As for owner satisfaction, Vitamix boasts an ace mark, while Ninja receives an impressive but not excellent rating. So Vitamix owners are slightly more likely to recommend their blenders to others.

These two blenders perform neck and neck in our tests. The Vitamix works for making soup, but Ninja rates a little better for ease of use. They’re tied in the icy drinks, ice-crushing, and noise tests. Vitamix comes out a tad better in the survey data, receiving stellar ratings for predicted reliability and owner satisfaction. And the Vitamix’s warranty lasts an entire decade—leaps and bounds longer than the Ninja’s one-year warranty. That said, even if your Ninja blender breaks, you can buy two more and still come in under the price of one Vitamix.

Considering the very close test results and very wide cost difference, we’re crowning the Ninja Professional Plus Kitchen System BN801 the winner of this face-off. It’ll make great smoothies and have no trouble crushing ice. And it’ll turn out decent soups—as long as you don’t blend ingredients while they’re hot. Plus, you don’t have to pay extra for personal-sized cups. If you really want a Vitamix but don’t want to shell out for the Vitamix Ascent Series A3500, the Vitamix 5200 costs less and scored highly in our tests.

Do your own face-off by using the filters in our blender ratings to compare other Vitamix and Ninja models, or those from other brands such as Blendtec, Breville, Cuisinart, KitchenAid, Tribest, and Wolf. In addition to more than 80 full-sized blenders, we have dozens of ratings of personal blenders and immersion blenders.