The 6 Best Latte Machines for Automatic Espresso Drinks (2025)

But here are the caveats: coffee cup height clearance can be an issue when drinking milk, the pump is a little louder than some, it’s slow to boot, some parts feel a little flimsy or plasticky for a machine in this price range. Plus, if you want the attached milk carafe, it’s $300 to $500 more, depending on current deals.

The gap between home espresso machines and the commercial workhorses used by busy third-wave shops is still thousands of dollars, but that hasn’t stopped both beloved brands and scrappy upstarts from infiltrating the space with more approachable units. Skip the junk and reach for the Casebrew 5700Pro (7/10, Wired review), which offers a neat take on the art of home-made espresso drinks.

Instead of confusing novices with millions of settings and onboard tutorials, this 12 x 11 x 16-inch tank of a machine keeps it simple with easily accessible controls for things like temperature and dosing volume for extraction and run time for the onboard grinder. This is a single-boiler machine, not a dual boiler, which means you can’t froth your latte milk while pulling a shot, but the texture of the frothed milk is perfectly pliable and worth sniffing for in the original leaf or rosetta pattern.

The guide rails that hold the portafilter in place are too close to the grinder’s output spout, and temperature controls that deal with absolute rather than relative values ​​would be welcome improvements. But until Casebrews implements our feedback, this is a solid unit that’s a great option for anyone who’s never ready to leave their house for a cappuccino. -Pete Cottell

Photograph: Tyler Shane

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wired

• Easy to use, with an excellent app that can warm up your machine from bed
• really good drip coffee
• Water reservoir in front, very good

tired

• A little messy, like a lot of new technology

The superautomatic Terra Café is an expensive piece of machinery and has some flaws, but given its ease and customizability, it’s worth the price, WIRED contributing reviewer Tyler Shane wrote last year. They praised the device’s convenience, its intuitiveness, front-facing water filter and waste tray, and the Milk Carafe and its excellent app (available for iOS and Android), which offers easy controls and the ability to heat your machine from your bed or bathroom.

Drinks like latte macchiatos, drip and iced coffee can all be adjusted to your taste, and the milk froth dial allows you to adjust the texture of the milk from frothy to silky. For those who love true, real, drip coffee, this is the biggest selling point for the Terra Caffè over our top automatic picks, the De’Longhi Rivalia and the Ninja Caffè Lux Premier: the TK-02 delivers it. The drip coffee is also so good that Shane wiped the Chemex pour-over carafe off his counter.

DeLonghi’s Magnifica Start is a no-nonsense superautomatic with a conical burr grinder, four preset recipes at the push of a button, and the ability to make a smooth and powerful espresso, wrote reviewer Tyler Shane, a WIRED contributor. Like other high-end De’Longhi appliances from this time, the milk frother is truly impressive, producing seriously spectacular frothed milk. Milk-based dishes are a Latte Macchiato and a Cappuccino at the touch of a button, while Espresso and Americanos are espresso-based options. It has a slot for ground beans and a hopper for whole beans. Figuring out the grind size required a bit of trial and error, Shane said, and it’s not an overly quiet machine. But the Start is compact and efficient, and it costs significantly less than our favorite De’Longhi automatic, the Rivalia. This makes the Magnifica Start a solid investment.

Questions and Answers

Photograph: Jeffrey Van Camp

The key here is automation. We wanted to test machines that would give you a cup of coffee with a single touch, or as close to it as possible. Therefore all the products in this list are of automatic and semi-automatic type. You fill them up and they do all the hard work – or most of it, anyway. There is no milk foam in anything here that does the job automatically.

Durability as well as setup and cleanup were particularly important. The whole purpose of this type of equipment is to save time and energy and/or produce a higher quality drink than could be made without it, so we didn’t recommend any products that didn’t produce delicious espresso. And Time saving.

Even if you’re not making espresso, the first and best thing you can do to dramatically improve your morning coffee is to buy locally roasted beans. Plug your city or area and “locally roasted coffee beans” into Google and you’ll be glad you did. The reason your locally roasted coffee will taste better than anything purchased from a major coffee roaster (like Starbucks, Illy, or Gevalia): Good coffee begins to lose its flavor as soon as it’s roasted. Get it fresh and you’re giving yourself a better chance of drinking high-quality espresso.

Need some help finding the best roaster? For some of our favorite mail-order brands, with beans often roasted the same day or week they’re placed in the mail, check out our roundup of the best coffee subscription services.

I hate to break it to you, but pre-ground coffee from the supermarket bag is always pretty bad. Unless you look at the roast date on the bag, you probably won’t know when the roaster actually roasted it. If the roaster is a French or Italian brand, there’s a good chance it was months ago. Coffee is best when it is fresh, ideally made a week or two after roasting. And grinding the beans dramatically increases the rate at which coffee spoils. It doesn’t just affect the taste of the coffee. This affects how well the espresso maker will push water through the beans, leading to potential blowouts or poor extraction.

If you haven’t made espresso before, and don’t have access to a coffee grinder, we recommend purchasing locally roasted beans. Simply ask your local coffee roaster for a fine (espresso) grind. We’ve tried lots of pre-ground espresso blends from popular companies like Lavazza, Gevalia, and Café Bustello. They were all very dark and very bitter, partly because they are all either imported or roasted in large batches and shipped all over the world. Pre-ground coffee will always be a little stale, and it’s hard to get a good cup from coffee that has started to go bad – which happens faster after you grind it.