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

A latte is rich and milky heaven. A cappuccino is the cloud that heaven rests on. The best latte machines and the best automatic espresso machines are the ones that can give you this richness consistently, easily, and deliciously. Home espresso machines, like the classic devices in our guide to the Best Espresso Machines, often have a reputation for being intimidating. But they don't have to be.

Some machines make it easy. The automatic espresso machines in this guide can make a perfect frothy cappuccino accessible with the press of a single button, or maybe a couple of buttons. Our top high-end superautomatic espresso machine, the De'Longhi Rivelia (7/10, WIRED Recommends), is a paragon of easy-peasy, frothy, pleasing cappuccinos and flat whites. The new Ninja Cafe Luxe Premier (7/10, WIRED Recommends) seems determined to produce every kind of coffee in existence.

Most of the machines on this list also come with grinders, but our guide to The Best Coffee Grinders may also be helpful. For more WIRED coverage of being wired, check out our guides to The Best Coffee Subscriptions, The Best Drip Coffee Machines, The Best Milk Frothers, and The Best Cold Brew Makers, or look for our recent coffee gear reviews.

Updated June 2025: We've added the De'Longhi Rivelia and the Breville Oracle Jet to our top picks and the Terra Kaffe TK-02 and De'Longhi Magnifica XS to our also recommended section. We've rearranged and updated our picks, as well as updated links and prices. Current and former WIRED contributors Jeffrey Van Camp, Jaina Grey, and Tyler Shane have written previous versions of this buying guide.

This sophisticated bean-to-cup machine from Italian coffee titan De'Longhi (7/10, WIRED Recommends) immediately ranks among the most modern, impressive, and capable superautomatic espresso machines I've encountered—the sort that has you dump a half-bag of beans into a hopper and will grind, brew, then froth up milk for a flat white, amid 18 options on espresso, latte, cappuccino, and iced-coffee drink options.

Pretty much everything operates via an easy touchscreen, including bean guidance that lets you optimize the machine for each bean. The milk frother works at the press of a button and makes actual microfoam—and the foam's density can be adjusted to make frothier cappuccino or dense flat white. It's so easy I let my parents test-drive it, and they fell in love with it within a day. If you've got multiple people using the machine, you can save multiple profiles and your favorite custom drinks. So Dad can have his basic “coffee” that's actually a European-style café crema, and Mom can have her ridiculously large 16-ounce travel-mug latte. (Yes, these are their drinks.)

What's better, the Rivelia has two swappable bean hoppers so it's easy to swap between caff and decaf, or between light and dark roasts. Honestly, this is the bean-to-cup espresso machine that fully sold me on the idea of automatic coffee machines like this one. Though note: Fully automatic espresso machines like the Rivelia grind a little coarser, in order to make espresso less finicky and less difficult. This leads to a smoother but less nuanced profile than espresso shots you'd find in a café. But if you're a milk lover, the absolute ease with which the Rivelia froths a cappuccino will likely balance this out. The cold espresso is also a pleasant option when mixed with milk or vodka.

Ninja has a habit of taking high-falutin', pro-level, or commercial equipment—whether soft serve ice cream machines or slushie machines—and finding a way to make it easy, accessible, fun, and probably viral on TikTok. WIRED contributing reviewer Tyler Shane was skeptical about Ninja's first foray into the latte and cappuccino world with the Luxe Cafe Premier (7/10, WIRED Recommends), especially since the machine also promised cold brew and even traditional drip coffee. But she came away impressed.

This Ninja is not a superautomatic machine like our top automated pick, the Rivelia. It's what the industry likes to call “semiautomatic.” Semiautomatic espresso machines offer a built-in grinder and automatic milk frother, but still uses a non-pressurized portafilter that will pull a classic espresso shot with full nuance and aromatics. In our espresso maker guide, we recommend the ever-reliable and terrific Breville Barista Express ($750) as WIRED's favorite accessibly priced semiautomatic. But this Ninja is the machine I'd probably give to a beginner, a new college grad, or anyone whose first priority is ease and great automatically foamed milk

The drip coffee is meh, granted. But more than perhaps any semiautomatic machine in its price range, the Ninja Cafe Luxe Premier is geared to absolute ease and versatility—with an intuitive digital user interface that helps you along. Depending on your chosen drink, the Ninja Luxe will recommend the appropriate grind size on its display screen and help you dial it in. (This may take a couple tries.) Milk frothing is easy, and the automatic milk frothing is shockingly good. Plus, you can froth cold foam, for silly cold-foam drinks. See what I mean? Ninja is fun. We look forward to testing Ninja's new Cafe Luxe Pro ($750), which costs a little more but adds a welcome auto-tamper and hot water spout.

This Mr. Coffee machine was once our top pick. Why? Because it sits so nicely at a comfortable intersection where ease of use meets automation and affordability. This is about the lowest-priced machine you can ever expect to find with automatic milk frothing at the press of a single button, with options of late foam or cappuccino froth. Just load fine-ground coffee into the portafilter, tamp it down, and twist it on. The machine will mix up a cappuccino or a latte macchiato at the press of a button.

This machine has a forgiving (but not overly intense or nuanced) pressurized portafiter, which means it will work with almost any “espresso-grind” coffee from your local café or the grocery store. Just note you'll still get a better shot of espresso if you buy a grinder and use fresh beans from a good specialty roaster. But all in all, this is about the easiest $200 latte machine we know. Like, the hardest thing about it is that the milk canister can be removed and stored in the fridge, and you have to clean it out once a week.

The Cafe Affetto is one of the few fully automatic machines that we've enjoyed in this price range. The Affetto features a built-in steaming wand, produces 20 bars of pump pressure to ensure your espresso is fully extracted, and is a slick little machine. It's very slim and fits comfortably on a small apartment countertop without having to rearrange everything. Because coffee production is automated, you just need to fill the water tank and put whole beans in the hopper, and you're good to go. You can brew one or two shots with just the press of a button, and there's a programmable button to create your favorite drinks (like an Americano with just the right amount of water).

The milk frother does a lot of the work on its own. Just pour some of your favorite milk into the frothing pitcher, submerge the wand, and hit the steam button. If you're new to frothing milk, you don't even need to move the pitcher to produce a creamy and consistent microfoam. We tested the frother with dairy milk, oat milk, and soy milk. It produced soft and creamy café-grade froth each time. Just make sure it's topped up with water and beans and that you clean out the spent grounds container regularly, and it works like a dream. —Jaina Grey

The Breville Oracle Jet (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is my favorite of the seven new espresso machines I've tried so far this year. It's the one I recommend as my top pick in WIRED's guide to the Best Espresso Machines, over other estimable contenders from Breville that include the Barista Touch ($1,000) and the Barista Pro ($849). And it's the one that best mixes full-flavored, nuanced espresso with the ease of machine-guided, touchscreen operation. It's versatile, it's powerful, its PID controller means the temperature is quite stable, and it makes absolutely lovely cups—espresso that's denser and more intensely aromatic than the coffee made by any other machine on this list, whether in bringing out the fruity berry notes in an anaerobic light roast, or the dark chocolate of a roasty Italian.

In the finicky, often difficult world of classic home espresso machines, the Oracle Jet is a paragon of simplicity and machine-guided brewing: It's a miracle that one can so easily pull such delicious and nuanced shots, that remain so sensitive to the character of each bean. But that sensitivity still makes the Oracle Jet a little more finicky than other machines on this list. And while the automatic milk frothing is quite good, it's not as failsafe as our favorites here. (I still like steaming milk manually on the Breville, versus using the auto-froth.) But if you want espresso that will distill he beauteous character of fresh-roasted beans but still don't want to try overly hard—on a machine whose intuitive touchscreen tutorial will guide you to lovely flat whites and capps? This is your huckleberry.

Former WIRED reviewer Jaina Grey loved this machine. It's the best Keurig that Grey ever used (8/10, WIRED Recommends), but it especially offers a terrific frother. (Though check out our updated pod coffee maker guide for more recommendations.) This K-Café doesn’t technically make espresso shots, because grounds aren't pulled under pressure. But it does make a delicious 2-ounce “espresso style” shot that can taste almost as strong. So why is it in this guide? The frother. It has three settings—cold, latte, and cappuccino—and it'll froth milk to perfection with the tap of a button, ready to be poured from the stainless steel carafe. It's a latte maker that's simple to use and easy to clean—and the milk is so beautifully foamed that it's tempting to use this device to froth milk for espresso made on other machines.

Sometimes making a whole latte or cappuccino using an automated machine can be a time suck. Not to mention, sometimes all you really want is frothy milk. That's where milk frothers come in. These machines beat air into milk, or milk substitutes, to get that nice creamy froth. Former WIRED Reviewer Jaina Grey loved this handheld from Subminimal, a highly specialized immersion blender that makes properly textured creamy, light, airy, wonderful milk. One screen makes fine-textured milk. One makes “ultra-fine.” But note that Subminimal has also added a milk frothing pitcher called the Nanofoamer Pro ($159) that costs a bit more, but is currently sitting prettily atop our guide to the Best Milk Frothers.

The delta 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 level up to the Casabrews 5700PRO (7/10, WIRED Review), which offers an unfussy take on the art of homemade espresso drinks.

Instead of bewildering noobs with a million 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 dose volume for extraction, and run time for the onboard grinder. It's a single-boiler machine, not a dual boiler, which means you can’t froth your latte milk at the same time as pulling a shot, but the texture of the frothed milk is perfectly malleable and up to snuff for a basic leaf or rosetta pattern.

The guide rails that hold the portafilter in place are a bit too close to the output spout of the grinder, and temperature controls that dealt in absolute rather than relative values would be welcomed improvements, but until Casabrews implements our feedback, this is still a solid unit that’s a great pick for anyone who’s ready to never leave their house for a cappuccino ever again. —Pete Cottell

The superautomatic Terra Kaffe is a pricey hunk of machinery and has its bugs, but considering its ease and customizability, it's worth the price, wrote WIRED contributing reviewer Tyler Shane last year. She praised the device's convenience, its ease, the front-facing water filter and waste tray and milk carafe, and its excellent app (available for iOs and Android) that offers easy controls and the ability to warm up your machine from your bed or the bathroom.

Drinks like latte macchiatos, drips, and iced coffee can all be adjusted to your tastes, and a milk frothing dial allows you to adjust the milk’s texture from foamy to silky. For those who love true, real, drip coffee, that's the biggest selling point for the Terra Kaffe over our top automated picks, the De'Longhi Rivelia and the Ninja Cafe Luxe Premier: The TK-02 offers it. The drip coffee is also good enough that Shane cleared her Chemex pour-over carafe from her counter.

The 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 brew a smooth and potent espresso, wrote WIRED contributing reviewer Tyler Shane. As with other high-ened De'Longhi devices of the moment, the milk frother is truly impressive, offering seriously luxurious frothed milk. Milk-based recipes at the touch of a button are a latte macchiato and cappuccino, while espresso and Americanos are the espresso-based options. There’s a slot for ground beans and a hopper for whole beans. Figureing out grind size takes a little trial and error, Shane noted, and it's not an overly quiet machine. But the Start is compact and efficient, and priced far lower than our favorite De'Longhi automatic, the Rivelia. This makes the Magnifica Start a solid investment.

The key here is automation. We wanted to test machines that make you a cup of coffee with a single touch, or as close to that as possible. So the products on this list are all of the automatic and semiautomatic variety. You fill ’em up and they do all the hard work—or most of it, anyway. Nothing here doesn't have a milk frother that does the work by itself.

Setup and cleanup were especially important, as was durability. The entire point of a device like these is to save time and energy and/or produce a drink of higher quality than can be made without it, so we didn’t recommend any products that didn’t produce tasty espresso and save time.

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 region and “locally roasted coffee beans” into Google and you will be glad you did. The reason that your locally roasted coffee will taste worlds better than anything you'd buy from a major coffee roaster (like Starbucks, Illy, or Gevalia) is simple: Good coffee starts to lose flavor the moment it's roasted. Get it fresh and you're giving yourself a much better chance at high-quality espresso.

Want some help finding the best roasters? 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 a supermarket bag is pretty much always worse. Unless you see a roasting date on the bag, you probably have no idea 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's fresh, ideally brewed a week or two after it's roasted. And grinding the beans dramatically increases the rate at which coffee degrades. This doesn't just affect how the coffee tastes. It affects how well the espresso maker will push water through the beans, leading to possible blowouts or bad extraction.

If you haven’t made espresso before, and you don't have access to a coffee grinder, we recommend you buy locally roasted beans. Just ask your local coffee roaster for a fine (espresso) grind. We've tried a lot of pre-ground espresso blends from popular companies like Lavazza, Gevalia, and Café Bustelo. They were all very dark and very bitter, partially because they are all either imported or roasted in big 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's started to degrade—which happens fast after you grind it.

Get it ground fresh from a local roaster, and you'll have about a two-week window before you'll notice any difference. Many of the machines recommended here come with a grinder, so whole beans are already the best choice. But our roundup of The Best Coffee Grinders can also provide some guidance here, if you want to get into the grinding game, buy whole beans, and keep your coffee tasting its best.

Look, milk is milk. Anything that contains milk has the potential to get strange over tiem, and this includes the milk containers and milk frothers on automatic espresso machines. WIRED's previous espresso reviewer, Jaina Grey, was extremely sensitive to this issue—devoting her time o dishwashering, soaping, scrubbing, and otherwise testing the best methods for making sure that milk containers on automatic espresso machines remain sacrosanct environments.

Regular washing is, of course, the first and best recourse. But occasionally, you'll also want to sterilize your milk reservoir and milk frother.

First, hand-wash it with soap and water as usual, and make sure you get a sponge into those corners. Next up, there are a couple options. The most effective will by a food-grade sanitizer like Star San, or One Step. Essentially, just make a dilution per the instructions on either product, pour that into a spray bottle, and give the inside of the milk container a couple sprays and let it dry on a drying rack.

The second-best option, the one that uses things you probably have in your house right now, is a mix of distilled white vinegar and plain old tap water. If you have staining or really stubborn smells, you'll want to let it soak. Try adding about one shot glass (1.5 ounces) of distilled white vinegar and fill the container up the rest of the way with warm water. Let it soak for about 30 minutes, then rinse it out till there's no more vinegar smell and you should be good to go.

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