The Best Cake Pans of 2026

If you can’t decide between a round and a bundt pan, you may like what Ballarini has to offer. This two-in-one setup gives you a flat base for round cakes and a fluted base for bundt cakes. The springform design lets you swap between the two bases easily and makes detaching baked goods effortless. Our cakes baked evenly, with no domed tops.

However, this setup has major flaws. First, though it claims a PFOA-free nonstick coating, all three cakes we baked (across both bases) stuck when we tried to remove them. The base also showed visible scratches, even though we avoided metal utensils in testing. We also ran into leaking, a common problem with springform pans across the board: In the yellow cake tests, batter leaked from the bottom of the springform.

As with other Great Jones cookware we’ve tested, the Patty Cake pans are gorgeous. They come in a set of two, in Broccoli (green) and Blueberry (blue). Each has a corrugated bottom complete with the Great Jones logo, but don’t worry—the pattern left only a few subtle lines on the finished cakes.

Construction-wise, it’s similar to our top pick from Chicago Metallic: aluminized steel with a nonstick coating. This cake pan feels sturdy and durable, yet light enough to lift and move easily. In testing, we baked two yellow cakes and a pound cake, which came out relatively even with slight doming.

Its major drawback is that fashionable bottom, which made cleaning harder than with the other pans we tested. Though it’s dishwasher-safe, we still recommend handwashing to extend its lifespan because nonstick coatings tend to deteriorate during heavy-duty wash cycles.

If you’re serious about making beautiful bundt cakes with clear definition, this Cuisinart pan is a more affordable alternative to our favorite bundt cake pan. It isn’t as stunning as the Nordic Ware pan, but its performance impressed us. Across multiple tests, it baked evenly, and the cakes unmolded easily every time. It’s a heavy-duty cake pan that turned out impressive cakes in our testing.

Be aware that the pan has an Xylan coating, which can be dangerous above 500°F, so avoid heating the pan when it’s empty. Metal utensils are also a no-go, but with proper care, it’s safe to use.

This cake pan is durable and withstands high oven temperatures without warping, thanks to its anodized aluminum construction.

However, baking perfect cakes in this pan may take more effort, as cakes stuck even after greasing. In testing, we noticed a few flaws: The yellow cakes were extremely hard to take out—we ended up breaking them. The interiors were runny and underbaked, which defeats the purpose of using aluminum as the base material. Because the cakes kept sticking to the bottom, we deducted a few points for ease of cleaning.

Sold as a set of two, it’s a bargain, but you may need to line the pans with parchment paper to make your life easier.

Like our Best Overall pick, this pan uses aluminized steel as its base material, which makes it durable and distributes heat evenly. Its silicone nonstick coating is safer than other chemical coatings and adds to the pan’s durability.

We disliked the dimpled bottom, which was a struggle to clean after baking. It’s also less nonstick than the Chicago Metallic—bits of residue stuck to the dimpled base. The USA Pan cakes also domed the most, making it a less attractive choice for bakers who want perfectly shaped cakes.

The Wilton Easy Layers set includes four 3/4-inch-thick layer cake pans designed to bake a perfect multilayered cake from a single batch of batter. This concept might appeal to people who are intimidated by cutting even a single layer from a cake. However, baking four thin layers of cake means dividing the batter into four equal parts and recalculating the bake time. You may also worry about even baking, since the four cakes sit in different parts of the oven, which likely has hot spots. In the end, you may spend more time portioning and doing math than you would slicing a single cake with an inexpensive cake slicer. Unless you’re dedicated to making a Dobos Torte as seen on The Great British Bake Off, you can save time with one of the other cake pans we tested.

The cakes baked in this pan came out consistently lopsided—this could’ve been an oven issue, but the other pans didn’t produce such weird shapes. In the yellow cake tests, the cakes repeatedly stuck to the bottom of the pan. In the pound cake test, where the exterior should be shiny and brown, this pan’s cake came out dull compared with the others.

We also found a discrepancy with the listing: The pan measures slightly smaller than 9 inches. If you’re looking to add a new 9-inch cake pan to your collection, you can skip this one.

Though this pan earns high marks in online reviews, its performance in our tests disappointed us. This anodized aluminum pan has some promising features: It’s durable and nonreactive, making it a safe baking vessel. What threw us off: Every cake stuck to the bottom when we unmolded it. At 3 inches deep, this straight-sided pan is much deeper than the others we tested, which made greasing harder.