Best Outdoor Pizza Ovens of 2025
We tried 8 ovens from brands like Ooni and Solo Stove. These days, pizza ovens can be larger, and some let you switch between gas and charcoal or wood.
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Outdoor pizza ovens are all grown up. In a few short years, these pandemic darlings have evolved from basic metal boxes into, well, more refined metal boxes. Many new models are larger, and some have gas burners in addition to charcoal reservoirs. And at least one model I tried comes with a self-spinning pizza stone, powered by electricity, to ensure even cooking.
As a group, outdoor pizza ovens feel better made and more deliberate in their designs than when I evaluated this kind of oven for the first time, back in 2021. And in some cases, prices have dropped quite a bit, too. Our favorite charcoal oven would have set you back $400 just a few years ago. Now it’s available for about $230.
Photo: Paul Hope/Consumer Reports Photo: Paul Hope/Consumer Reports
Should You Get a Gas or Wood-Burning Pizza Oven?
Outdoor pizza ovens mostly fall into one of two camps: gas-burning and coal- or wood-burning. Gas-burning ovens connect to the same propane tanks you’d use for a gas grill. Wood-burning ovens have a reservoir designed to hold charcoal briquettes, lump charcoal, wood chips, or wood chunks, any of which you might also use in a charcoal grill. Many can also hold wood cooking pellets, made from treated and compressed sawdust, like you’d use in a pellet grill.
The terms coal-burning and wood-burning are used interchangeably. Charcoal is really just wood or compressed sawdust that’s been baked to remove moisture and flavor-altering VOCs. Every coal- or wood-burning oven I’ve encountered can use coal, wood, or a combination of the two.
Both gas- and wood-burning ovens can turn out great pizza, but gas gets the edge for simplicity because you don’t need to build a fire. Wood-burning pizza ovens get points for imparting a unique smokey flavor, which you can ramp up by using more wood and less charcoal. The gas ovens are great because they’re more consistent, while the wood-burning ovens really require you to regulate the fire in order to control the heat. Many new ovens can run on either gas or wood, and those are the real winners.
In my own yard, I’d opt for using wood or coal for cooking one or two pies because the flavor is tough to beat. But if cooking for a crowd, I’d switch over to gas to avoid tending to the fire between pies.
Best Outdoor Pizza Ovens
The Pi pizza oven is Solo Stove’s first foray into outdoor ovens, and it’s a winner. The oven is solid as a rock, thoughtfully designed, and frankly, it just works every time it’s used. I found it supremely easy to cook with, using either gas or charcoal, and it’s equally simple to switch between the two modes by installing the gas burner.
Pizza emerges crisp and evenly cooked, and the gas controls duplicate what you’d find on a gas grill or stove. Turning the knob causes the flame to grow or shrink, adjusting the heat in the process.
The circular shape is naturally conducive to making a pizza, and I find it vastly preferable to the cylindrical or oblong designs you’ll find on many other ovens. The opening is also sized just right, small enough to keep most of the heat inside the oven but big enough to make it easy to slide in a pie or turn it while cooking. Plus it comes with a lifetime warranty. Many pizza ovens I’ve reviewed are covered for only one year, while some are covered for up to five or 10 years, but only if you register them.
Perhaps more importantly, when you cook in the Pi oven, it feels like you’re using a tool designed to last for decades. This is the pizza oven I could see using for years.
The Ooni Koda gives the Solo Stove Pi a real run for its money if you’re interested in cooking only with gas. The fit and finish are stellar, and it feels solid and built to last. The Koda has folding legs, which make for easier storage or transport. But be warned: It weighs nearly 40 pounds, so it’s not necessarily my first choice for toting to a cookout. The opening hits the sweet spot: Narrow enough to trap the heat but wide enough to easily slide in a pie or rotate a pizza.
A single burner knob makes it easy to adjust the cooking temperature, and I got great results with one pizza after another. For most people, the lower cost and ability to switch from wood to gas make the Pi oven the more obvious choice. But if you’re committed to cooking with gas—and there’s no judgment if you are—I’d give this model a serious look.
As a bonus, Ooni can’t be beat when it comes to accessories. In addition to the basics, like covers and pizza peels, Ooni offers infrared thermometers, multitiered oven tables, carrying bags, and even topping stations, all of which match its ovens.
The Ooni Karu is a perfect pizza oven if you’re looking to make small coal- or wood-fired pies. Many of the smaller pizza ovens I’ve seen feel cheap or flimsy, but the Ooni Karu is clearly built to last more than one or two summers. It’s got heft, weighing in at just over 26 pounds, making it pretty heavy for a small oven. It’s light enough to take camping or tailgating but heavy enough to feel sturdy when you’re actually cooking. The folding legs help with transport.
In my tests, pies from this oven were exceptionally tasty. You control the heat in the Karu by adjusting the size of your fire—a bigger fire burns hotter—but this model also has a damper, which the others don’t. Open it up all the way if you want your fire to burn hotter or close it a bit to restrict airflow, which causes the oven to cook at lower temperatures. A solid, well-built oven door helps hold in the heat.
Like the gas-fueled Koda oven above, the Ooni Karu has tons of compatible accessories.
The fire-engine red Le Peppe looks like it was plucked from the set of a Fellini film. Pizza from this oven was every bit as delectable as those from the Ooni, and it cost less. But there are drawbacks.
The fuel basket (which is the part that holds the charcoal, pellets, or wood) is the smallest of the models I’ve seen, so you need to refill it frequently if you’re cooking more than a single pizza. And the chute that allows you to add coal or wood to the basket is prohibitively small, large enough to accommodate standard charcoal briquettes but too small for larger pieces of lump charcoal. (You need to hunt around in the bag for pieces that fit.) Big chunks of hardwood won’t work, either. That’s not a huge deal, but it’s also not something you want to be doing when you’ve got dinner cooking in a flaming-hot oven.
Unlike the Ooni Karu, this oven has no damper on the chimney, which means there’s nothing you can really do to control the temperature inside the oven. If you build a fire that gets too hot—you can tell from the built-in thermometer—you have to wait for the flames to die down a bit before sliding the pizza into the oven. Otherwise it’s likely to burn.
Next issue: The oven door is on the thin side and does little to trap or retain heat in the cooking cavity. That means the back of the oven tends to get much hotter than the front, requiring you to rotate the pizza frequently to ensure even cooking. Still, you’ll learn the oven’s quirks in time, and it’s hard to find too much fault with a tool that costs less than $200 and still lets you make fabulous pizza without leaving your backyard.
The gas-fired BakerStone is a workhorse, offering consistent performance and demanding only the mildest of learning curves. The oven is made of two parts. The top is an insulated oven with ceramic-lined walls, designed to reflect heat evenly. The base of the oven is a metal stand with two gas burners. This oven can cook 14-inch pies, bigger than some other products here can handle but smaller than what you can cook in the largest gas and dual-fuel ovens.
From the first run, every pizza emerged evenly cooked with a golden, crisp crust and perfectly melted cheese. While this is a solid enough pick, if you can swing it, it’s worth trading up to the Ooni or Solo Stove gas options, which both come with better designs and longer warranties. And the two-part design is a drawback. Because the oven and burners are separate, it’s a nuisance to transport.
The Fremont holds a slightly larger pizza than the other wood-fired options I evaluated, and it has the largest fuel basket. That means you can build a bigger fire and cook pizzas back to back, without needing to top off the wood or pellets in between, as you do with Le Peppe’s oven.
But while the larger capacity is nice, the oven lacks some of the polish you’ll find on other models. The oven door is flimsy and tough to rest in the opening; it fell out frequently as I worked, which made for a somewhat stressful experience. Still, once I got used to it, this oven turned out delicious pizzas.
One nice feature is the handle built into the top of the oven, which makes for easier carrying, and which none of the other ovens have.
Bertello got its launch on Shark Tank, but while the judges were wowed by its pizza, I found it lagged behind its competitors.
The long, deep design means much of the heat is concentrated near the back, so you need to rotate pies frequently. And because it’s so deep, it’s not as conducive to cooking round pizzas, which tend to do best in a round oven. But I did give it a try with some calzones, wings, and veggies, and found that it’s stellar for all of those, particularly when you’re cooking in an oblong, cast-iron casserole dish.
That’s not to say you can’t make a great pizza in it—you absolutely can—I just didn’t find it as easy as in some of the other ovens. Overall, the Bertello feels solid, with a generously sized opening in the back for adding wood or charcoal. But given that it’s roughly the same price as the Ooni Karu, I’d steer you in that direction.
The priciest oven here is also among the swankiest, but that doesn’t translate into effortless pizza.
Aside from its slick round design and blazing orange exterior, the Kiln oven boasts a self-turning pizza stone powered by electricity. (You can plug the oven into an outdoor outlet or use batteries.) That means that once you add your pie, you can simply press a button to rotate the pizza as it cooks, which results in a top that’s evenly cooked every time. But it took me multiple tries to get a perfect pizza.
Even with the maximum recommended preheat of 30 minutes on high (and with the boost burner on full blast), I found the stone struggled to cook the lower crust all the way through before the top of the pie burned. After some trial and error, I got better results by preheating the oven on the hottest setting, then turning down the flame. That technique gives the crust a chance to cook through before the toppings burn.
I used the oven on three separate occasions just to confirm my results, and I’ll say that the best pies I made were those that I finished in my regular oven. I also got decent results by pre-cooking the crust in the Kiln oven before I added my toppings. While I was very impressed by the rotating stone, I couldn’t help but feel that the most expensive pizza oven I tried should make the best pizza with the least fuss, and the Kiln did neither. As a result, I’d suggest you opt for either the Ooni or the Solo Stove Pi, which both cost less.
Photo: Theresa Panetta/Consumer Reports Photo: Theresa Panetta/Consumer Reports
How to Make Pizza in an Outdoor Pizza Oven
Once an outdoor pizza oven is going, you can churn out pies in just a few minutes. But getting them perfect takes practice. After making more than 50 pizzas in these ovens, these are the tips I’d offer:
Preheat fully. Across every oven I’ve tried, my biggest challenge was always getting the bottom crust to cook through before the top of the pie burned. The fix? Preheat for a very long time. Follow the oven manufacturer’s directions, but plan on 10 to 30 minutes. Then, try a pie.
If you’re using a gas oven and the top still burns before the bottom crust is set, try preheating the oven on the hottest setting, helping the lower pizza stone get nice and hot. Then, before you place your pie in the oven, turn the heat way down. That will help ensure the lower crust can cook from contact with the hot stone before the top starts to burn.
In a coal- or wood-burning oven, you can try the same technique by building a roaring-hot fire to heat the pizza stone, then allowing the fire to die down a bit before adding your pizza.
If you still struggle to get the crust cooked through, I recommend precooking the crust for a few minutes in your outdoor pizza oven, then adding toppings to the partly baked crust.
You can also finish a pie using the oven in your kitchen. Just cook the pie in your pizza oven until the top looks perfect, then transfer the pizza to a cookie sheet and finish it at 400° F in your kitchen. I use the bake cycle, without convection, because that causes only the bottom of the oven to heat. That heat transfers to the cookie sheet, then to your pizza crust, helping the crust cook through without burning the toppings.
Photo: Paul Hope/Consumer Reports Photo: Paul Hope/Consumer Reports
Work fast. In a pizza oven, 10 seconds can mean the difference between a perfect pie and a burnt blob of ingredients. Make sure to have everything you need on hand before you start to cook. For me, that includes a pizza peel, a pair of long-handled tongs to help rotate the pie as it cooks, and a worktable (complete with some cookie sheets) right next to the oven. That way, I have a place to put the fresh pie the moment it’s out of the oven.
Working fast applies to assembling the raw pie, too. If you leave fresh dough on a pizza peel for too long it sticks, and instead of sliding neatly into the oven, everything will slip off the peel in a giant ball, leaving you with a terrible mess to clean before you can try again. Sprinkle the pizza peel with white flour or cornmeal to prevent sticking. The unbaked crust should slide around effortlessly on your pizza peel. Add your sauce and toppings, and aim to get the pie into the oven in a minute or less—I promise, you can. I like to cook one pie fully before I start assembling the next.
Practice makes perfect. Cooking pizza in an outdoor oven is unlike cooking anything else. Chances are good you’re going to make mistakes. I’d estimate I’ve ruined close to a quarter of the pizzas I’ve made, and it almost always happens the first few times I use a new oven. Try your hand at cooking in your oven several times before inviting over a flock of hungry friends and neighbors.
How CR Evaluates Outdoor Pizza Ovens
Over the past three years, we’ve purchased eight different pizza ovens. I’ve assembled and set up each in my yard and read the directions diligently before starting to cook.
I’ve cooked more than 50 pizzas, a vast majority made with store-bought dough (for consistency) and the same brand of sauce and mozzarella cheese. When evaluating ovens, I even purée the sauce in my blender to ensure an even viscosity.
I follow the manufacturer’s directions for cleaning, prepping, and preheating the oven. I also scour the manual for such tips as what heat settings to use for gas models or how to build a perfect fire for coal- or wood-fired models. Then I inspect the pizza, taste it, and note the results. If it’s not ideal, I’ll make a few more pies, adjusting the temperature or timing until I get great results. I’ve found that almost any outdoor pizza oven can make a great pizza, but some make the process a heck of a lot easier than others.
Because I use each of these ovens myself, I’m able to track new models as they come on the market, compare my notes from other ovens, and occasionally find a new favorite.
