1. Best overall
2. Best A3-capable
3. Best compact
4. Best inkjet
5. Best sustainability
6. Best secure
7. Best SMB
8. Best business AIO
9. Best enterprise
10. How to choose
11. How we test
Finding the best Brother printer to meet your specific requirements can be a challenging endeavor, given the vast array of options available from one of the most esteemed brands in the printing industry. Brother's extensive range of printers, known for their quality and reliability, caters to a wide spectrum of budgets and printing needs, making the selection process somewhat daunting.
However, the search for the best Brother printers is a worthwhile pursuit, as they represent some of the best printers in the market today. Whether for personal or business use, Brother printers stand out for their durability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, offering high print yields without compromising on affordability.
Our comprehensive roundup includes the finest models from Brother's lineup, encompassing the best all-in-one printers, best inkjet printers, and best laser printers, so we've got all the major bases covered.
In our evaluations, we've meticulously compared these Brother printers on several key factors, including print quality and speed, connectivity features, build durability, ease of setup, operational costs, and overall design aesthetics.
For those in search of the best printing solutions, Brother's diverse portfolio is likely to have a printer that perfectly aligns with your needs. Continue reading for our expert recommendations, complemented by a price comparison tool to assist you in finding the most suitable Brother printer for your requirements at the best possible price.
The best Brother printer in 2024
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Below you'll find full write-ups for each of the best Brother printer models on our list. We've tested each one extensively, so you can be sure that our recommendations can be trusted.
The best Brother printer overall
This fully-featured inkjet is aimed at the home office, though it would serve an SMB (small and medium-sized busines) equally well thanks to its high capacity for paper and ink. It has two paper trays and is compatible with Brother’s larger-than-usual ink cartridges, which could last you a whole year.
Brother’s marketing blurb calls this big cartridge system INKvestment Tank in the US, or All In Box, in the UK and basically means you’re getting enough bundled ink to print up to 3,000 mono and 1,500 pages with the option to buy XL cartridges that can double that yield.
It’s not as economical as a refillable ink tank, but it is slightly more convenient. Other convenient features include a touchscreen interface, a front USB Host port, a 20-sheet ADF, Wi-Fi and NFC. That’s a lot of bells and whistles, not to mention ink, for your buck.
Read the full review: Brother MFC-J4540DW
The best Brother printer with A3 capability
Given its ability to print on A3 paper, this is a surprisingly compact multifunction device, that will happily share a desk with your PC. It prints clearly in monochrome, while colour photos look quite vibrant on photo paper. The touchscreen is rather small and it’s not the fastest duplex printer around, but it hits a near perfect balance balance between quality, performance, and features.
This four-in-one printer has a deep 250-page A4 paper tray and a rapid 22 ppm churn rate, along with neat internal cable management. The companion app is also quite useful because it tells you how much ink is left.
Similar to a lot of other models aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, the printer has Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity, and Wi-Fi direct if you want a wireless connection without a router.
Read the full review: Brother MFC-J5330DW
The best compact Brother printer
This little grey box can really churn out the pages and despite the size, it will hold a lot of paper too. This makes it ideal for the small office with a high demand for black and white documents. The quality is consistent and the per page print cost is attractive. It is a little light on features with no Wi-Fi or a front USB port, but what it does, it does very well.
Although it is designed for a small office, this printer's large enough to hold 300 A4 sheets in its input trays and 150 sheets in the output tray. Although there's no inbuilt Wi-Fi, you can connect this printer to the office router through an Ethernet cable (not included). You can then connect through your smartphone using the Brother iPrint&Scan companion app.
- Read the full review: Brother HL-L5100DN
The best Brother inkjet printer
This big Brother blurs the line between home printer and office printer by combining the fast print speed and high capacity of a laser machine with the superior photo finish of an inkjet. We would recommend it for both applications because although it is smaller than the laser equivalent MFC-L8690CDW, the inkjet MFC-J5945DW can handle A3 paper. There’s really nothing that this fully featured 4-in-1 can’t do and it carries out all tasks satisfactorily.
Since inkjet technology takes up less space than laser, this printer has plenty of paper and ink capacity in a compact unit. It comes with standard-sized ink cartridges and can deliver 6,000 pages.
There's a 9.3 cm color touchscreen that's quite responsive and is set in a tilting panel that's easy to operate. There's a USB port in the front panel for plugging in a flash drive and another one inside the printer.
Read the full review: Brother MFC-J5945DW
The best sustainable Brother printer
Brother’s INKvestment Tank cartridges hold more ink and therefore offer better value and convenience, but the printers are usually more expensive as a result. This is the cheapest INKvestment printer available and while it is rather light on features, it prints very well and makes economic sense. There’s no display of any kind, so you will be using your computer or mobile device to set up this stripped-back all-in-one.
There’s no USB Host port, or Ethernet port and not even an auto duplex mode, but if all you don’t mind turning the paper over yourself, you can save a lot of money and still enjoy high print quality. The bundled ink cartridges will give you a modest 720 mono and 480 color pages, but you can upgrade to XL cartridges with a much higher yield.
Read the full review: Brother DCP-J1200W
The best secure Brother printer
This dedicated print-only device is well built for such a low-cost laser printer and well suited to the home office or SMB (small and medium-sized business). There’s ample room for paper (250 sheets) and it ships with enough toner for 1,000 mono pages and 1,000 color.
To hit the price point, its functionality is somewhat paired back, so don’t expect to find a touchscreen, USB Host port or NFC module. It does, however, tick off all of the key features. It can auto duplex and has dedicated button to pull down private print jobs at the machine. It prints in color as quickly as it does in mono (24 pages per minute) and it does so very well too.
The Brother HL-L3230CDW passed all of our tests with flying colors and no paper jams. If you need a simple, but secure color printer, this should be on your list.
Read the full review: Brother HL-L3230CDW
The best small business Brother printer
It may be compact, but this powerful printer comes with all the bells and whistles and still finds room for 300 sheets of A4 in its paper tray. You can expand on this with a choice of additional paper cassettes and stand options as your business and demands grow, but most will be more than happy with the rapid print rate (31 pages per minute) and high yield toner cartridges.
It’s armed with all of the security features you might want from a workgroup printer, including NFC connectivity. There’s an auto-duplex mode, a front USB Host port and it even offers a small, but very convenient touchscreen control panel.
This printer can print a maximum of 80,000 pages per month, but the recommended monthly limit is 6,000. Along with the standard connectivity features, the HL-L9310CDW supports Apple AirPrint, Brother iPrint&Scan, and Google Cloud Print, among others.
The best all-in-one Brother printer for business
The Brother MFC-J6945DW (known as the MFC-J6945DW in the UK) is an inkjet that’s aimed at a role in a busy office more usually filled by a laser printer. The impressive print speed is only a little slower than the average laser, while offering all the advantages of an inkjet, such as the ability to print on photo paper at a higher image resolution.
It also comes with an unusually generous amount of ink — enough for a whole year, apparently. The most impressive feature, however, is its ability to duplex print and scan not just A4 paper, but A3 as well.
It has three trays and you can load a total of 750 sheets in them. The printer has a print speed of 22 ipm in mono and the fastest FPOT (first page out time) in its class — under six seconds.
Read the full review: Brother MFC-J6947DW
The best Brother enterprise printer
The Brother MFC-L9570CDW is a sizeable multifunction printer aimed at enterprise and medium-sized business. It has capacity for 250 sheets of A4 in its main tray and scope to increase that dramatically with extra accessories. It prints quickly at 31 pages per minute and Brother recommends a high print volume of up to 6,000 pages per month.
Sitting towards the top of Brother’s product tree, the Brother MFC-L9570CDW is loaded with features from single-pass dual scanning to an 80-page automatic document feeder and a large touchscreen control panel. This is a generously-specified printer that can grow to meet the demands of a really big office.
This Brother printer has a sizable control panel and a customizable 7-inch touch display for inputting commands easily. You can set up icons on the touchscreen to automate up to 64 custom workflows, like scanning to an email address or a cloud storage website.
The best Brother printer: how to choose
To choose the best Brother printer for yourself, you'll first want to consider whether you'll be using the machine at home or office, and how much printing you could be doing on a monthly basis.
Then, you'll want to assess whether you'll be doing text-heavy printing or something that's more image and graphic-oriented. If it's the latter, you'll want to pick a high-quality image printer with relatively low ink costs.
If you'll be printing several hundreds or thousands of pages a month, you'll want a machine that can keep up with the heavy output, and whose ink prices are not too steep. It'll also help if the printer comes with a lot of toner and ink.
Don't forget to assess the printer's speed and multi-function capabilities. You'll also want to check the printer's connectivity options and control panel, among other things.
The best Brother printers: How we test
We measure all our printers on our test bench and compare the results against the other printers we've tested and reviewed. We use a standard ten-page document across all printers to assess their performance.
To analyze the printing speed and quality, we print the same set of documents (instead of relying on manufacturer given figures). The test pages have fonts of different sizes and colors, mixed image and text, and just photos. There are additional tests to evaluate color fidelity, sharpness, and contrast.
Importantly, we also calculate the running costs of the printers and consider their design, build quality, and connectivity.
