The Best Alternatives to the KitchenAid Stand Mixer of 2026

From the minute you unpack the Breville the Bakery Chef, you know it’s a well-designed, high-quality product. Its streamlined shape, smooth surfaces, well-fitted parts, and LED readouts indicate that it’s a precision machine.

The speed dial works in conjunction with a lighted bar that’s marked to show you which mixing task to use at each speed level. On the base, there’s a timer that you can set to an exact time; forget to put it and it will count up so you can track how long you’ve been mixing.

In addition to the beater, whisk, dough hook, and splatter shield provided with most mixers, you get an extra beater with scraper edges and a lid to cover the bowl when you’re rising yeast dough or refrigerating sugar cookie dough.

Plus, the Breville comes with two bowls: a 4-quart stainless steel bowl and a 5-quart glass bowl with measurement markings on the side. A lamp shines down into the bowl so you can tell when your eggs and sugar have turned pale yellow or your cream is thickened.

But of course, we wouldn’t recommend it unless it was also a great mixer. When we used the scraper beater to whip up a cake mix, we didn’t have to stop and scrape the side of the bowl even once. It had no problem beating a sturdy cookie batter full of chips, oats, and raisins. The Breville easily kneaded our recipe for two loaves of bread, but the manufacturer does not indicate if it can handle a heavier load.

You won’t find a hub on this mixer for attaching accessories like a grinder or pasta maker, so you can’t justify the high price by thinking you’re getting more than one appliance for your money. However, its beautiful design, excellent mixing ability, and helpful extras do make it worth the splurge. The Breville is available in black, white, silver, champagne, and dark blue.

The retro 50’s styling of the Smeg Stand Mixer with a bullet-shaped head and a stainless-steel body is its distinguishing feature. But in addition to being eye candy for your countertop, this sturdy mixer offers impressive mixing prowess.

In all our tests, it yielded top-notch results. While it is only recommended that you use enough flour for a single loaf of bread, we found it to be the most effective at moving the dough around as it kneaded, producing a ball that needed no hand shaping and a loaf of bread with an exceptionally high rise.

As it works, this mixer is noticeably quieter than others. Our only complaint is about the speed lever. While it moves smoothly, selecting your speed level is difficult. The lever is located on top of the head and has small and indistinct numbers.

As you would expect from this Italian brand, a pasta roller and cutters to attach to the hub are available as well as a grinder, slicer/shredder, and ice cream maker accessories. You can choose from several glossy finishes as well as models with bases that are colored to match the head.

When it comes to ease of use, the Cuisinart Precision Master SM-50 trumps the KitchenAid. To tilt the head, there’s a simple switch, and to select a speed setting, a smooth-turning dial, marked with large numbers. It tied with the Smeg for the quietest operation.

In our tests, this mixer excelled at whipping egg whites and mixing cake mix. But as soon as we added flour to the creamed eggs and sugar for the cookie dough, it slowed down. The manufacturer specifies that it should only be used to knead enough dough for two loaves of bread, and it was able to produce a nice, smooth, satiny ball. But overall, we would say this mixer is best for cake bakers.

The stand mixer is available in white, red, black, silver, and two different shades of blue. A variety of accessories are available to expand its usefulness, including a pasta roller and cutter, pasta extruder, meat grinder, frozen dessert maker, and spiralizer.

We've reviewed three Kenmore Mixers, and we like the Kenmore Ovation the best. As the name suggests, the Ovation is bound to elicit a round of applause—or at least a few oohs and aahs—whenever someone new walks into your kitchen. The innovative pour-in top design allows users to add ingredients directly into the bowl without turning off the mixer or awkwardly tilting them in on the side. It’s beautiful, convenient, and unlike anything else on the market—yet it doesn’t outpace all the competition when it comes to actual performance.

Don’t get me wrong, the Ovation is a strong mixer. In our tests, it evenly mixed chunky cookie dough and kneaded bread without resisting or walking across the counter. When it came to final cleanup, there was little more to do than place the bowl and accessories in the dishwasher—the pour-in top and 360-degree splash guard prevented even a trace of flour from escaping during the mixing process.

Yet unlike that of every other mixer we’ve tested, the Ovation’s 5-quart bowl is made of solid glass, making it particularly beautiful but very, very heavy—over 6 pounds. While the casual user might not be bothered by the weight, my arms were sore from carrying it by its handle between multiple batches and hand-washing sessions.

The bowl isn’t the only thing gigantic about the Ovation—the entire machine weighs 30 pounds and is wider than most other mixers, meaning it takes up valuable counter space. Its size seems to work against it in different ways—it’s slow and less nimble than other stand mixers we tested. It took nearly four minutes to whip up three egg whites—almost twice the time of the KitchenAid Artisan—and its paddle attachment couldn’t quite get to the mixture at the very center of its wide, flat bowl. Ultimately, Kenmore is onto something with this unique pour-top design, but the rest of the appliance still needs some work.

The Kenmore Elite 6 Quart has a more powerful motor than the Kenmore 5 Quart (600 versus 400 watts) and a larger capacity. Still, testing showed that the ability of the machine to mix and whip was not materially different than the Kenmore 5 Quart.

It whipped more slowly, but incorporated chunks into cookie dough faster and more efficiently. The motor was the loudest we tested, and whined ear-piercingly as it kneaded bread dough. If you have your heart set on an affordable bowl-lift design, though, this Kenmore (model number 89308) costs a bit more than the tilt-head Kenmore.

The Kenmore Elite 5 Quart Mixer looks, at first glance, very similar to the Artisan, and in our last round of testing, this mixer was our Best Value pick. From the lock switch on the back to the shape of the bowls, it is easy to confuse the two mixers until you turn them on.

The Kenmore 5 Quart's motor is significantly louder than the Artisan's, and the motor’s tone has a high-pitched whine. There are also minor problems with the design of the attachments.

For instance, the wider flat top of the bread hook caught a lot of flour as we added ingredients to the bowl. The neck of the paddle attachment makes it difficult to remove without getting dough on our hands. In addition, after 10 minutes of kneading bread, the bowl had tightened onto the base of the mixer almost to the point where we couldn’t get it off.

That all being said, these issues only make the mixer less user-friendly, and we were still impressed with its overall performance in our tests. (We tested the 89208 in red.) At a price nearly half the list price of the Artisan, these tradeoffs will make sense for many buyers.

The Hamilton Beach Eclectrics Mixer is one of the least expensive stand mixers we tested. It is styled like the Kenmore 5 Quart, with a simple button for head lock release and a speed dial. The biggest concern with this mixer is the motor. Despite being rated at 400 watts, the mixer struggled to mix thick cookie dough and knead bread during testing.

We also found that the bowl handle’s sharp edges cut into our hands uncomfortably, and although the speed dial is labeled up to 12, the motor only has six speeds. At roughly the same price, the Kenmore 5 Quart is a much better choice.

The Dash Delish is small, adorable, and comes in cute colors, including aqua and orange. However, it’s lightweight and seems more like a toy than a serious kitchen appliance. The other mixers we tested use a single attachment that spins in a planetary motion in a stationary bowl; this one uses two beaters or dough hooks that twirl and a bowl that rotates. There’s a switch to move the bowl from side to side that’s supposed to help the beaters cover more territory. However, we found the bowl did not turn consistently.

Although it takes longer than other mixers, ultimately, the Dash gets the job done, even kneading dough for a pizza or loaf of bread. But you need to help it along by stopping and scraping the bowl or moving the dough around often. In the case of chunky cookies, you have to stir in the final ingredients yourself as the Dash doesn’t have the oomph to disperse chips and oats into the batter.

Despite its small size, it was the noisiest mixer we tested. The bottom line is that this mixer is easier to use than a hand mixer, but it is not highly recommended to anyone who bakes even on an occasional basis.