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Reviewed / Bosch / Samsung
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Reviewed / Bosch / Samsung
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The Hisense HRM260N6TSE is the best mid-range French-door refrigerator we've tested. Read More
An all-around fantastic fridge that provides both cold and stable temperatures. Lots of storage, but a generally small freezer. Read More
This tech-forward fridge boasts a 32-inch touchscreen and AI-enhanced smart features, making this fridge ideal for a fully enabled smart home. Read More
If you're willing to spend more for an amazing look and user experience, the Café CAE28DM5TS5 is one of the best 4-door fridges available. Read More
The GE Café is a statement piece with so many outstanding features, including a gorgeous platinum glass finish, a brightly backlit LED panel, and rose gold accents on every piece of interior shelving. Read More
Nothing adds functional organization to a kitchen quite like a French-door refrigerator. There’s something especially satisfying about opening up those double doors and having more than enough room for whatever casserole dish or grocery haul you need to store.
Besides boasting extraordinary interior space, the best French-door fridges offer a number of highly desirable features: If you want a French-door refrigerator with an ice maker, internal water dispenser, or flex drawer, you’ll find it on this list.
While the best French-door refrigerators sometimes cost more than their side-by-side and top-freezer counterparts, the user satisfaction that comes with a French-door fridge is typically worth the higher price tag. On this list, we break down the pros and cons of top-rated French-door refrigerators from a wide range of price points.
The Hisense HRM260N6TSE is one of the best fridges you can buy at this price point.
Exceptional crispers are just one of the many features that make this counter-depth Bosch French-door fridge a winner.
Excellent temperature control
Large fridge compartment
Internal dispensers
Small freezer
This tech-forward French-door fridge is equipped with a 32-inch touchscreen and Samsung's AI Vision Inside.
Large, full-color, app-enabled touchscreen
Adjustable FlexZone drawer
Spacious design
AI Vision may not always be accurate
This 4-door Café refrigerator has a premium feel and excellent performance.
Near-perfect temperature performance
High-end features like an LED-lit back wall
Flexible-temperature quadrant
4-door design requires crouching or kneeling to access
Flexible-temperature compartment takes time to change to freezing temperatures
Consistent temperatures
Backlit interior
Custom-temp drawer
Smaller usable capacity
Handy flex zone
Premium beverage experience
Compatible with Smart Things app
Auto open door great for accessibility
Temps can be inconsistent
Cumbersome cleaning experience
Clunky settings panel
Near-perfect temperatures
Lots of highly-customizable storage space
Effective crispers
A few fixtures feel cumbersome to use
Backlit interior
Flexible drawer with custom temp
Through-the-door ice and water
Consistent temperatures
Custom-temperature refreshment center
Smart features
Crispers don't hold on to humidity well
The controls' digital temperature readout is inaccurate
Glass surfaces could crack
There are many factors to consider before buying a refrigerator. Beyond budget, style, and kitchen space, you may also want to think about finish, warranty, and special features like Wi-Fi and smart platforms.
Whether you’re renovating or retrofitting, it’s important to ensure you’re looking at the right size fridge. Measure the width, height, and depth of your space (don’t forget door clearance!) and double-check the measurements of fridges you’re considering buying. While width and height can vary from model to model, there’s a greater difference in depth, especially between standard-and counter-depth fridges. (Read more in FAQs below.)
Frequent entertainers may need different features than a family of six with kids who need school lunches. Whether you're storing more wine and cheese, or gallons of milk and jars of jelly, look for adjustable shelves and door bins, spill-proof glass shelves that are easy to clean, and humidity-controlled crispers for fresh fruits and veggies.
Customized temperature zones are also helpful for flexing storage space as needed. Some compartments can go from the perfect wine storage temperature to extra freezer space for ice cream or frozen pizzas, at the touch of a button.
Through-the-door water and ice dispensers used to be the most common configuration, but our research has found that in-door ice dispensers have more service issues than internal ice-makers. Internal water dispensers—typically accessed on the inside wall of the fridge—take up less space than those built into the fridge door.
Another popular solution from manufacturers like Samsung, GE, and Café is the in-door beverage center with water dispenser and auto-fill pitcher. By keeping the ice-making in the freezer, manufacturers not only improve storage space, but can offer multiple types of ice, like Samsung’s dual ice maker with cubes and Ice Bites.
Don’t forget to factor in filter replacement costs, and put reorders on a schedule to keep up with necessary maintenance.
Refrigerators with Wi-Fi connectivity are increasingly commonplace and can now do far more than send an alert when the fridge or freezer door is left open too long. Connected apps can help keep track of your fridge contents, adjust temperatures ahead of a big grocery trip, and send important maintenance alerts.
Some refrigerators also come equipped with a touchscreen, which you can use for everything from accessing recipes to streaming TV, movies, or music. These high-tech fridges also connect to voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Home.
Stainless steel (typically fingerprint-resistant) has become the most common finish for kitchen appliances, but it isn’t the only option by far. The French-door fridges on this list come in everything from stainless-steel and black stainless to white glass, even custom-colored panels. You can now choose the aesthetic that’s right for your kitchen, even if it isn’t stainless steel or bright white.
The build quality often goes hand-in-hand with the finish, and budget may dictate what you can afford, but some affordable brands are known for being particularly durable, like GE and Bosch. Look for models with comfortable, sturdy handles. Consider the type of hinges and ensure the doors open properly into your space.
Warranty is typically one year for parts and labor, but some brands offer 5- to 10-year warranties on compressors, converters, or other sealed elements.
Don’t forget to measure your home’s entry and doorways to ensure your desired fridge will fit upon delivery. Most delivery services will hook up the water line if the fridge has water and ice dispensers, but always check to make sure.
Haul-away services for your old fridge are often included with the delivery but may incur a small fee. Always have a plan to dispose of an old appliance before scheduling delivery of the new one.
French-door refrigerators feature the fridge compartment above the freezer compartment. The fridge has two French doors with handles at the center that open outward.
In most 3-door French-door models, the freezer sits beneath the refrigerated compartment and pulls outward like a drawer. Four-door models can either have an additional drawer between the fridge and freezer, or two doors below the refrigerator that house either freezer compartments or one freezer and one flexible-temperature compartment.
The boon of a French-door fridge over a top-freezer, bottom-freezer, or side-by-side, is its sheer amount of space, as well as premium features like water and ice dispensers and custom-temperature flex compartments. They also tend to have a larger chassis, which provides more room for compressors and superior airflow.
Standard, or full-depth fridges, are generally 30 to 36 inches deep, while counter-depth fridges are 24 to 28 inches deep and either sit flush with the edge of the counter or only protrude slightly.
While standard-depth refrigerators are deeper so they naturally offer more space, there are a few reasons to a counter-depth fridge: You need the fridge to fit into an existing enclosure in your cabinetry, you want a fridge that's flush with your cabinets, and/or you're trying to make the most of a small kitchen space.
Even if you need to economize on space, a counter-depth French-door fridge will give you more usable fridge space, plus better organization and visibility, than a top-freezer or side-by-side fridge.
When deciding how much to spend on a fridge, know that there’s a large price range for French-door fridges, as well as a huge variety of possible extra features.
Most French-doors typically fall into the $2,000-$3,500 range, sometimes running upward of $4,000. We've reviewed excellent, entry-level French-door refrigerators that cost under $1,500 and higher-end, feature-dense models that cost over $5,000.
Special features like filtered water dispensers, dual ice-makers, custom-temperature flex drawers, Wi-Fi connectivity, and built-in touchscreen displays can boost the price.
Our refrigerator testing lab is a sealed room connected to a system that automatically maintains a constant 70°F temperature and 50% relative humidity, regardless of how hot and dry or cold and wet it may be outside. Keeping environmental factors consistent is extremely important, because variations in temperature and humidity can affect how hard a fridge needs to work.
We evaluate French-door refrigerators on objective and subjective metrics; you can read about our complete testing process for more information. The objective tests allow us to compare core performance across models and manufacturers, while the subjective tests give us insight into how easy it is to use a refrigerator in day-to-day life.
To ensure consistency in our testing, we keep each refrigerator in a climate-controlled chamber that ensures a temperature of 72°F +/- 5°F and a relative humidity of 50% RH +/- 15% RH. Refrigerators have to work harder if the air surrounding them is extremely hot or cold, so by ensuring stable room temperature conditions we can directly compare fridges without worrying about the weather that particular day.
We run standardized tests on the refrigerators, measuring everything from their temperature consistency over time, their humidity levels, and how energy efficient they are. We also hand-measure each and every shelf and bin, to ensure a consistent methodology across brands: No counting the empty space around an ice-maker or in the gap between the door and interior shelves.
Check out one of our in-depth refrigerator reviews below:
There are nearly endless options in French-door refrigerators, and the experts are all nearly as varied in their opinions on what’s the best French-door fridge. To save you some time and trouble, we’ve gone ahead and done the research for you.
Wirecutter: Wirecutter’s top pick French-door refrigerator is the LG LRFLC2706S, a traditional 3-door fridge with a spacious interior for its counter-depth footprint and an internal water dispenser and ice maker.
Consumer Reports: The Consumer Reports team gives the GE GYE22GYNFS its highest refrigerator rating, giving it the highest scores for temperature performance and ease of use.
Good Housekeeping: The GH team picked a different LG model for it’s top refrigerator, the LG LL31H6530S. Consumer reliability and unique features like two types of ice are called out as factors in this selection.
User comments around the best French-door refrigerators display the typical vitriol of brand preferences and appliance shopping headaches. We’re pulling these user reviews from some of the largest consumer sites and appliance retailers.
AJ Madison: Customers at this giant online appliance retailer highly rate our favorite counter-depth fridge, the Bosch B36CT80SNS, with 4.6 stars, and our favorite full-size French-door fridge, the Samsung RF90F29AECR, gets 4.7 stars, making them among the highest rated fridges at AJ Madison.
reddit/BuyItForLife: While most folks in the BIFL subreddit generally agree that few fridges are truly buy-it-for-life-worthy, Bosch gets the most positive recommendations and anecdotes for reliability and usability, which we’ve also experienced in our testing over the years.
Lowe’s: The Hisense HRM260N6TSE is exclusive to Lowe’s and has garnered more than four stars from consumers reviewing their purchase. Owners are happy with the large capacity, convenient storage features like the flex drawer, and its exceptional value.
Mark Brezinski works on the Home Team, reviewing refrigerators, minifridges, dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, air conditioners, air purifiers, and fans.
Jonathan Chan currently serves as the Lab Manager at Reviewed. If you clean with it, it's likely that Jon oversees its testing. Since joining the Reviewed in 2012, Jon has helped launch the company's efforts in reviewing laptops, vacuums, and outdoor gear. He thinks he's a pretty big deal. In the pursuit of data, he's plunged his hands into freezing cold water, consented to be literally dragged through the mud, and watched paint dry. Jon demands you have a nice day.
Leigh Harrington has 25 years experience as a writer and editor for myriad print and digital publications.
At USA TODAY and Reviewed, Harrington oversees large appliances, including refrigerators, dishwashers, ranges, and laundry, and manages Reviewed's overall home content, including areas of focus like home improvement, cleaning, gardening, cooking, and parenting. She focuses on developing and editing consumer ed content, product reviews and buying guides, but she also writes, too.
Harrington is also an experienced travel writer, and has authored books including Fodor's Boston, 100 Things to Do in Boston Before You Die, and Colorful Boston, an adult coloring book. www.leighharrington.com
Freelance Editor, Kitchen & Appliances. Danielle has a B.S. from Syracuse University and a AAS in Culinary Arts from Newbury College. Previously, Danielle was a Test Cook and Associate Editor at America's Test Kitchen, as well as a freelance recipe developer and food writer. She’s the mom of two boys and loves making pizza on Friday nights.
Our team is here to help you buy the best stuff and love what you own. Our writers, editors, and experts obsess over the products we cover to make sure you're confident and satisfied. Have a different opinion about something we recommend? Email us and we'll compare notes.
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