Best coffee machines in Australia: The top home espresso machines in 2024

The best coffee machines are those that make preparing your morning cuppa not only delicious, but which are convenient, easy-to-use and can potentially teach you a thing or two about what makes a good coffee, great. 

Naturally, you'll find coffee machines to suit all budget types. What may surprise you is that the cheaper coffee machines aren't necessarily always the pod coffee variety, and you can find some very good manual coffee machines without breaking the bank. 

And, while it may be true that the more you spend the closer to authentic "cafe quality" you're going to get, don't for one minute think that a 'cheap' machine is going to serve you a coffee you're going to want to immediately pour down the drain. 

Below you'll find our pick of the best coffee machines in Australia right now, catering to all budgets, all machine types and all sizes of kitchen counter space.

Whether you like your coffee black or white, tall or short, hot or cold, there's a coffee machine out there for you. We've done the hard work so that you can just sit back and choose which one is for you. And don't worry, we've tried and tested them all – though not all at once. We don't drink that much coffee.

Written By

Written By

Joel Burgess

Joel has been the in-house benchmark monkey for the Australian TechRadar team and Australia’s two biggest tech magazines (APC and TechLife) since 2014. 

In between compiling giant spreadsheets of the top performing laptops, Joel has developed a keen interest in getting granular with consumer hardware. If he’s not pushing a gaming rig to its limits, he’ll be pressure testing the latest home coffee machine or digging into the science behind air purifiers.

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The quick list

Want to cut to the chase and find out what the best coffee machines are? Below is a list of the best devices for different needs and budgets, offering a more detailed review of every pick for anyone who wants to dig a little deeper, along with our price comparison tool to help you find the best deals on the best machines.

The best coffee machines 2024

Below you'll find full write-ups for each of the best coffee machines in our list. We've tested each one extensively, so you can be sure that our recommendations can be trusted.

Best overall

If you want better coffee at home, but don’t really have the time or motivation to learn how to be a barista, then Breville’s Barista Touch Impress is built specifically for you. The company has done a lot of research into the main pain-points of manual coffee machines for first-time users and has pieced together a set of clever technologies into a machine that requires no existing coffee knowledge or barista experience.

The Breville Barista Touch Impress combines the user-friendly assisted tamping and auto-dosing of the 2022 Barista Express Impress with the intuitive touchscreen and automatic milk frothing of the Barista Touch to make the simplest manual coffee machine for first-time users available. 

The integrated grinder and tamping mechanism gives you feedback on how much coffee is going into your basket and the touchscreen provides prompts on exactly what settings you need to change in order to grind the perfect amount at the optimum coarseness. When this info is combined with advice on what to do if the shot takes too long or finishes early, you get a coffee grinding feedback system that can easily be dialled-in for excellent coffee by anyone after just one run of the machine.

It’s also excellent at making cafe-level milk, whether you know how to froth it or not. The Barista Touch Impress is best at turning full-cream cow’s milk into perfectly aerated coffee milk, but one of the headline features is that the new Auto MilQ system comes with customised steam presets that allow you to make great oat, soy or almond milks for your coffee as well. The automatic wand and temperature gauge combine to deliver good quality milk without you having to learn any milk folding techniques. 

When you combine all these features you get excellent manual-machine level coffee that anyone can easily make by following prompts and pushing a few buttons. If you are a trained barista using a dual-boiler manual machine it’s possible to make better coffee faster… but the difference isn’t big enough to not be tempted by all the added conveniences of the Barista Touch Impress. 

It’s expensive, but there isn’t another device around that you can use without any skill that’ll make better coffee, which makes the Barista Touch Impress the best all-round home coffee machine for everyone in our eyes. 

• Read the full Breville the Barista Touch Impress review

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Best pod machine

Pod coffee is an amazingly convenient solution for instant espresso at home, but, as convenient as it is, there’s always been a noticeable difference between it and what you can get from a café. That’s not really the case any more thanks to The Morning Machine, a Singaporean start-up coffee company that’s brought the pod machine into the home-barista era. 

The Morning Machine is the first pod machine to offer customisable pressure and temperature controls, advanced brewing functionalities and a set of scales for getting the perfect output. These features allow independent single origin coffee roasters to customise a brew schedule for the pods they sell in the Morning marketplace, a combination that delivers a level of flavour that hasn’t been possible from pods before. 

The pod machine is connected to a smartphone app that allows you to order or schedule coffee pods from a wide range of Australian and international coffee roasters and then select and make the coffee using a routine customised by the roaster — all at the push of a button. 

The company has partnered with Subliminal to offer the NanoFoamer Pro milk heating and foaming jug as an optional extra if you want to add milk to your coffee.

All of this adds up to result in a machine that offers plenty of improvement over standard coffee pods to be well worth the top pod machine position. When you consider the level of coffee produced and the minimal effort involved in setup, it may actually be even better than a manual machine for tasting a wide range of single origin coffee. 

• Read the full Morning Machine review here

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Best budget machine

If you’re here, you are probably looking to up your home coffee game and for those willing to learn a bit of the craft you can get home coffee machines that are good enough to never have to leave the house for coffee again. 

The Barista Express has been the best entry level espresso machine on the market for some time now and there are a number of reasons why. In a nutshell, it was one of the first to be able to do everything you need to make cafe quality at home, without costing too much.  

The first killer feature of the Barista Express is the grinder. A good grinder is critical for espresso as you need to grind beans fine enough to create the pressure for great coffee. The Barista Express grinder has a generous hopper, ample grind-size settings and an adjustable grind amount that lets you set-and-forget for perfect dosage at the push of a button. 

The Barista Express has an easily accessible magnetic mounted tamper to compress and level the grinds and full size group head that can deliver up to 15 bar of pressure to the 54mm portafilter. This is enough pressure to produce good crema from even slightly stale beans (when ground finely) and the pressure gauge makes it simple to understand if you have the right coarseness and amount of coffee for any shot. It even preallocates shot volumes so you don’t end up with too much coffee if you get the grind dose wrong. 

The Breville Barista Express is a single boiler machine, which means you will have to wait until a shot has finished pouring before you can start frothing milk. It even takes about 10 or so seconds after turning on the steamer to get up a full head of steam, but once going there’s enough pressure to fold milk like a pro.

For anyone wanting café level coffee there’s no better value first step than the Breville Barista Express. It is a manual machine so for the best results you will have to learn a little about coffee making, but this machine turns a complicated ‘art’ into a more-than-manageable process to do at home.

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Best one cup pod machine

If you’re going for a pod coffee machine, especially a top dollar one, then you can safely assume that convenience is up there with your most important considerations — and what could be more convenient than a coffee assembled directly in the mug you’re going to drink from? 

While your leading pod coffee machines will generally come with a dedicated milk frothing machine, they’re usually only large enough to make milk for one coffee, so Lavazza’s decision to froth milk directly in the mug and then add the coffee shot to it is actually pretty ingenious.  

Simply add the amount of milk you want to the included Deséa mug (it has levels for different styles of coffee), insert a pod into the top chamber and press the corresponding coffee button and you’ll end up with the finished product in about a minute. 

The output was a little hot for us, but considering the number of people who need to singe the top layer of their tastebuds in order to enjoy a coffee, it’s likely to be about the temperature that most people would want. It even has a temperature boost button for anyone planning on waiting a bit before drinking their coffee. 

There are three presets for espresso sizes and a free pour button, in addition to three milk coffee options and a setting for just frothing hot or cold milk. These options should include enough variety to please most and the coffee pods taste pretty good against other pod machines. 

It’s worth pointing out that there’s still a big difference in flavour between this and what you can make on today’s best manual coffee machines for the home, but the Deséa is a lot less effort. 

If you want to use your own mugs or you're making more than one coffee, the Deséa mug might seem redundant and unappealing. That said, it’s not the end of the world to transfer the coffee into a different mug. You still get the benefit of a dishwasher safe milk frothing glass. A welcome change for anyone who’s tried to clean caked milk from around the heating element in a milk frother. 

The milk texturing and steam heating system is all contained in a removable lid for the Deséa glass mug, which makes it easy to take out and clean. The system does a good job of adding texture to milk, for an automatic machine and the cup size is generous enough to have as much milk as you’d want. 

While the range of pods isn't the most extensive and there doesn't seem to be any recycling programs available for spent pods, you can at least set up convenient recurring subscriptions for around AU$0.70 per coffee pod. 

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Best Nespresso pod machine

Nespresso added this sleek Vertuo coffee machine to its line-up in March 2023. The colourful Pop range is big on personality while minimising the overall footprint of the coffee machine for those kitchens tight on space. The Vertuo Pop is made from 35% recycled plastic and the company has done a fair bit of work to make it easier to recycle used capsules and reduce the overall environmental impact of the system. 

Nespresso is still expensive as far as coffee goes, costing about the same per shot as beans from your premium local roaster. The Vertuo range of coffee pods were also designed to cater to individuals who prefer a more ‘Americano’ style coffee that can fill a 414ml cup without milk. So if you’ve got a Nespresso Classic machine and you like local flat whites then there’s really no need to switch.   

There’s only 7.2 grams of coffee in a standard 40ml Nespresso Vertuo capsule, which is roughly a third the amount of coffee a café would use to produce a similar shot. Nespresso has done a great job in stretching the flavour of these shots, but these kinds of proportions are only going to be able to take you so far towards good tasting coffee. If you’re looking for café quality coffee at home, you'll have to look elsewhere. 

The Pop range does offer a pro mode that will reduce the volume of coffee output depending on the type of pod to give you a more intense shot of flavour that will be better for coffee enjoyed with milk. I tested the pop with the new Bianco Piccolo range that, according to Nespresso, was designed for the Australian coffee palette, but even this more concentrated blend just doesn’t deliver the same viscosity and flavour as something made with 18g of coffee (or more) per shot. 

The way the Vertuo Pop delivers coffee is still a major step forward from instant and many plunger coffees and you can get it for a fraction of the price of a manual or automatic bean-to-cup device. It's also exceptionally simple to use, fast and doesn’t require any oversight, so there’s plenty to like.

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Best under 1K

The Barista Express has been the top of our favourite coffee machine pile for some time now thanks to its excellent balance of features and cost.  So, it’s perhaps not overly surprising then that we were pretty excited about its spiritual successor, the Barista Pro. 

Like it’s predecessor the Pro includes a grinder and bean hopper to save a little space on your kitchen benchtop. In addition to having a good quality conical burr grinder that is precise enough to ensure you get crema from reasonably fresh coffee beans, it’s also got customisable auto grind dosage timers that will measure out grind volumes automatically. 

You will need to calibrate this yourself initially, based on the particular coffee beans you’re using, but even novices can work this step out with a set of scales and an online tutorial. This is a manual coffee machine so you should expect a bit of back and forth when dialling it in or when you change the type of coffee beans you use, but once it's calibrated the coffee making process is very streamlined. 

The Barista Pro has replaced the analogue pressure gauge with a new digital screen that makes it a bit easier for the less savvy barista to interpret how to make their coffee better. Instead of pressure, the new screen only includes a shot clock, so you’ll have to look at shot volume using independent scales to determine if your grind needs to be finer or coarser, but the screen does show you which way to turn the grind size dial to adjust shot time and volume, which is helpful info for learning baristas.  

One of the few pain points of the Barista Express was the fact that it only has one boiler, so there was a bit of wait time between pulling a shot and having your milk wand pressurised enough to fold milk. Breville make a big deal about the 3 second Thermojet technology in the Barista Pro marketing materials, so we had high hopes for this particular component, but it’s not quite the transformative leap we were anticipating. It definitely reduces the time it takes for the milk wand to be running at full speed, but you’ll still want to give it a 5-10 second head start to build up pressure. 

With the right ingredients and a bit of know-how the coffee you can make on this machine is on par with what you’ll get at a good café. For anyone occasionally making coffee for guests then the bean to cup time on the Barista Pro is totally fine. If, on the other hand, you’re making any more than, say, four coffees in a row every day then you’d really benefit from the time savings of being able to froth milk simultaneously using a more expensive Dual Boiler machine.

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Best pod and milk machine

The convenience of pod coffee means it’s still the go-to platform for many Australians making coffee at home and if you don’t mind the taste of your average capsule then it’s hard to look past Nespresso’s wide array of machines and coffee.

Nespresso has partnered with Breville to build a new Creatista machine that integrates the Vertuo centrifusion pod system with Breville’s milk frothing technologies. 

While Nespresso has had a version of the Creatista available for some time, the Vertuo Creatista uses the newer style centrifusion pods that can (theoretically) produce more subtle flavours thanks to a different extraction technique that requires less pressure and heat. In reality, it tastes pretty similar to the old capsules so we wouldn’t recommend replacing your existing machine expecting an improved experience. 

One thing that is likely to be much better is Breville’s Auto MilQ system for frothing the perfect accompaniment to your espresso. The milk wand system on the Vertuo Creatista isn’t as sophisticated as what you’ll get on something like the Barista Touch Impress, but it’s pretty good at turning cold, full-cream milk into a nicely textured milk at the perfect temperature on its own. 

There are three levels of heat and foam to choose from, a selection that will get close enough to your favourite style for anyone interested in Nespresso. It’s an easy to use system, but it ends up causing the machine to be as expensive as some premium manual machines and it doesn’t really elevate the flavour of the coffee that much above what you get from any other Vertuo machine and Aeroccino frothing system. 

The Vertuo capsule range features barcodes that will automatically deliver the shot size that each pod was designed for, making it as simple as possible to get the perfect shot and it includes a new function to make more concentrated coffee shots by double pressing the shot button. 

Despite these improvements you can get way better flavour from a manual machine like the Bambino Plus with good quality coffee (that isn’t roasted for as long as Nespresso’s blends). If you absolutely have to have a Nespresso pod machine, however, then this is the best one for making milk coffee.

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Best Travel

The Wacaco Nanopresso is a pocket-sized coffee machine with the ability to brew hand-pumped espresso. So whether you’re not taken in by a blimp-sized domestic espresso machine or simply on the go so much that home means more than one place, the Nanopresso is a surprisingly worthy contender. There’s no battery or charging: it’s all done by creating up to 18 bars of pressure through hand-pumping, and the end result is comparable to what you’d be served in a cafe.

Lighter, smaller, easier to pump and yet twice as powerful as its Minipresso predecessor, the Nanopresso comes with a built-in espresso cup and lightweight case that’s moulded perfectly to house the device. 

If you’ve never used an outdoor espresso maker before, it takes a bit of time to work out what’s going on, especially when slotting it all back in together, but it gets much easier after the first few uses. This is definitely not a machine to try for the first time at 7am on a weekday morning, but it’s great for taking high quality espresso with you no matter where you go.

In effort, cost, and experience required, the Nanopresso couldn’t be further from the Breville the Barista Touch Impress, yet you can get a similar tasting shot of espresso with a bit of practice. It is more of a faff, as it does involve boiling water and finding a flat spot if you’re outside, but the end result is seriously impressive.

Read our full review: Wacaco Nanopresso

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Best alternative manual

After weeks of machines from Breville, Nespresso Vertuo and Melitta, Gaggia’s Classic has a tough act to follow. No, it doesn’t create impeccable microfoam by itself or remember your name and chosen latte strength at the flick of a button. But when we’d gotten to know its old school ways (such as priming the machine and the lack of touchscreens to rely on), it felt like finding a comfortable middle ground for coffee and owner.

Day after day, we missed the weight of a heftier coffee maker. But it’s also incredibly compact, fitting in alongside everything else in your kitchen, and although it doesn’t have much height to fill buckets of coffee up, there’s no denying the chic design credentials of an Italian classic.

Aside from design, the Gaggia Classic is a traditional 15 bar pump espresso machine with a pressurised filter holder. The machine comes with filters for ground coffee, or you can use ESE espresso pods and it does produce a great crema-topped espresso if you know how to get the most out of a coffee machine.

The steamer wand will give you some great foamed milk: there’s no temperature gauge to tell you when to stop steaming, which we found tricky after relying on the insight of the Oracle Touch. But again, the Gaggia feels a bit like going back to basics. Considering it’ll cost you much less than an Oracle Touch, learning the traditional espresso method may be worth the savings.

Read our review of the: Gaggia Gran Deluxe

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Most stylish

If you want your coffee machine to be more than just a tool then you’ve probably already been tempted by Smeg’s Espresso Coffee Machine. The classically designed Espresso Coffee Machine fits neatly into Smeg’s 50’s retro appliance range — making a great statement piece in any kitchen. While it’s definitely up there with our favourite looking machines, if you know how to use it you can actually make a half decent cuppa’ too. 

The ECF01 comes with an integrated milk frother, water tank and a group head with a single or double shot basket, which is impressive considering it’s half the size of most manual coffee machines on the market. 

While being compact is immediately appealing, the Smeg Espresso Coffee Machine shares a single boiler between the milk wand and group head and it only currently works with double walled coffee baskets. This means that it takes more than 10 seconds to build up a head of steam to start milk frothing and you won’t get as much flavour from your coffee as you would using a traditional single wall espresso basket. 

That said, we were still able to get decent coffee shots with plenty of crema, but the machine only includes a soft plastic tamper which caused some less experienced coffee makers to struggle to get the basket tightly packed enough — leading to some disappointing results. 

The milk wand, on the other hand, has been designed to help first time coffee makers get more air folded into the milk. While this is great for anyone who hasn’t mastered latte art, it doesn’t offer the control required for those that have. 

If looks are the most critical component in your coffee machine considerations then Smeg is the machine to beat, but you can get better results from some of the manual machines listed above and you’ll get comparable coffee from some automatic pod machines. 

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How to choose

The first decision you're going to want to make is do you want a pod machine or an espresso machine that uses freshly ground beans? 

Pod Machines - Pods offer peak convenience allowing you to get decent coffee at the push of a button and have your coffee ready in no time.  If you rush in the mornings or you aren't willing to dedicate a weekend to learn how to be an at-home barista then pod machines are for you. 

Manual Espresso Machines - If you're an ex barista or you are a coffee obsessive that will do anything to get the perfect cup of coffee int he morning then you're probably going to want a manual espresso machine. Basically manual machines get more rudimentary as they get less expensive, so those with more skill/ time/ determination will be able to make café level coffee from a $500 machine that's almost as good as what can be done on machines that cost thousands. 

Automatic Espresso Machines - The other end of the ground coffee spectrum are automatic espresso machines. There are some legacy at-home machines that'll do milk and coffee in a vending machine style, but these devices are often expensive and don't taste great. Fortunately there's a new wave of automatic and semi-automatic espresso machines that have a manual machine appearance but will do everything for you. If you can afford to drop $2K on a device then the top manual espresso machines offer low barrier to entry and great coffee. 

Cost - You'll get the most bang for your buck with full manual espresso machines, but the Morning Machine pod coffee maker is an affordable option for super simple café level espresso. 

• Best Coffee Machine Deals to save big on your next coffee machine. 
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