Can Anyone Out-Creami The Ninja Creami? I Tested Rivals from Cuisinart and Nutribullet

In the ’90s, there were bread makers. Then came the George Foreman grills of the early 2000s and the Instant Pots of the 2010s. The 2020s' countertop appliance du jour? The Ninja Creami.

Since its release in 2021, the Creami has become ubiquitous, largely thanks to TikTok and Instagram. It’s easy to understand why: The device promises to magically spin any frozen liquid into a dreamy, creamy frozen treat in minutes. After owning a Creami for a year, I can confirm it delivers, and I’ve admittedly become kind of obsessed with blitzing up fruit sorbets, frozen yogurt, and endless flavors of protein ice cream every night as a post-dinner treat.

What makes the Creami so innovative is that it adapts a technology typically found only in a commercial appliance called a PacoJet for the home kitchen. Both use a spinning blade to push up and down through a block of frozen liquid, shaving it into thin layers and creating a creamy, smooth purée. Ninja was the first brand to make this technology widely available for home cooks, but as with any trend, other brands are hopping on the bandwagon. Cuisinart and Nutribullet both released their own versions within the past year, and I wondered: Could either of these new models out-Creami the Creami?

I put all three ice cream makers in a head-to-head test, churning out creamy pints of ice cream and sorbet to find out which one reigns supreme. After thoroughly testing each model, I finally have a verdict.

• The winner: Ninja Creami
• The runner-up: Nutribullet Chill
• The disappointment: Cuisinart FastFreeze
• How I tested
• What I looked for
• How do these machines differ from traditional ice cream makers?

The winner: Ninja Creami

Ninja

CREAMi Ice Cream Maker

Amazon

It turns out the OG Creami just can’t be beat. It produced impressively smooth ice cream, handled mix-ins with ease, and turned whole chunks of pineapple into delightfully dense sorbet.

What we love: The Ninja Creami is dead simple to use: Just prepare your base, freeze it in the provided pint container for at least 24 hours, insert it into the machine, and press the button for your desired preset. The cycles run for two to four minutes, depending on which you choose, and I found that both the ice cream and sorbet I made required one more pass on the Re-Spin setting to go from hard and crumbly to smooth and creamy.

I was blown away by the texture of the frozen treats I made. The ice cream was incredibly smooth, easily scoopable without being too soft. An ice cream expert will tell you that nothing the Creami makes can ever approximate the texture of traditionally churned ice cream, but the pint I made came pretty close. Perhaps even more impressive was the sorbet, which I made from whole chunks of fresh pineapple. Within minutes the Creami turned the frozen fruit into a dense, ultra-smooth sorbet so good my colleagues were shocked to learn it had just one ingredient.

If you want to add mix-ins (and why wouldn’t you?), there’s a dedicated button for that. This setting did a great job at incorporating oaty cookies into the pint of vanilla ice cream I made, breaking them up and distributing them top to bottom.

What we’d leave: The Creami's biggest downside is its size. At just over 18" tall, it likely won't fit under standard upper cabinets. It's also quite loud, though you'll only have to tolerate the noise for a few minutes at a time. Handwashing the parts is a bit annoying due to the nooks and crannies, but everything except the base is dishwasher-safe.

The runner-up: Nutribullet Chill

Nutribullet

Chill

Nutribullet

Nutribullet’s entry into the Creamiverse is sleek, compact, and available in pretty pastel colors. The Chill performed well in testing, but a few key drawbacks kept it from taking the top spot.

What we love: I appreciated the Chill’s simple interface, which features an LED display with five settings (Ice Cream, Sorbet, Gelato, Smoothie Bowl, and Frozen Yogurt). It produced a smooth vanilla ice cream in under four minutes, which is around the total time the Creami took (including re-spinning). It also produced a serviceable sorbet, though I had to pre-blend the pineapple before freezing, which added an extra step and meant cleaning yet another appliance.

At 15" tall and less than 10" deep, the Chill is more compact than the Creami, and its ability to fit under standard upper cabinets makes it much easier to store. It’s also sleeker and less of an eyesore, which is a major plus for an appliance you might want to leave out on the counter. The parts all disassemble and are (top rack) dishwasher-safe, so cleanup is a breeze.

What we’d leave: The Chill lacks a designated setting for mix-ins, so you'll have to stir in any additional ingredients by hand after processing. There's no re-spin setting either, which wasn't an issue in my tests (both the ice cream and the sorbet reached optimal consistency after one cycle), but could be a problem depending on the mixture you’re using. My biggest gripe, though, was that I had to pre-blend ingredients (like pineapple chunks) before processing them. Given that convenience is one of the main reasons to opt for this style of machine over a traditional ice cream maker, this felt like a major downside.

The Nutribullet Chill produced a smooth and creamy ice cream, but the texture wasn't quite as good as the ice cream made in the Creami.

The disappointment: Cuisinart FastFreeze

Cuisinart

FastFreeze Ice Cream Maker

Amazon

Williams Sonoma

Cuisinart

The Cuisinart FastFreeze uses similar technology to the Creami and the Chill but requires you to manually push down to force the blade through your frozen liquid. It’s much smaller than either of the other machines and makes cute little half-pints that are great for one person, but the texture of the finished ice cream and sorbet was nowhere near as ideal as what the Creami and the Chill could achieve.

What we love: The FastFreeze's footprint is its biggest selling point. It’s a fraction of the size of its two competitors, making it enticing for anyone with limited counter and storage space. It makes half-pints of ice cream (whereas the Creami and the Chill both make full pints), which are optimal for solo ice cream enjoyers, and it’s the quietest and cheapest machine of the bunch by far. If you’re looking to hop on the Creami trend without shelling out the big bucks or giving up a ton of precious kitchen space, I can understand why you’d consider it—but it’s worth noting that it comes with some significant drawbacks when compared to its competitors.

What we’d leave: The FastFreeze sounds great on paper, but I was disappointed by its performance in testing. Did it transform frozen liquid into frozen treats? Yes, but neither the ice cream nor the sorbet I made reached a desirable consistency.

To operate the FastFreeze, you’ll need to press the power button and push down on the device until the blade has reached the bottom of the cup, and then repeat as needed. By the time my ice cream was fully processed, it was well past soft-serve consistency and started melting in minutes—plus it was quite lumpy. The sorbet (which I made by mashing fresh pineapple in the cup before freezing per Cuisinart’s instructions) was much more scoopable but took several minutes of manual processing to reach a somewhat creamy consistency, and never got completely smooth. This isn’t exactly surprising—the FastFreeze’s motor is far less powerful than that of the Creami or the Chill.

Because the blade can’t be detached from its base, the FastFreeze was the most difficult model to clean. You’ll have to carefully hand-wash this part, though you can dishwash the half-pint containers.

The Cuisinart FastFreeze produced very soft ice cream that was quite lumpy.

How I tested

To test the Ninja Creami, Nutribullet Chill, and Cuisinart FastFreeze, I made vanilla ice cream according to each manufacturer’s recipe. For the machines with a mix-in setting, I tested this by adding oat cookies to the fully processed ice cream. I also made pineapple sorbet, following each manufacturer’s instructions for making sorbet from fresh fruit. For the Creami, this meant adding pineapple chunks to the container and freezing it. The Chill instructed me to blend the fruit before freezing, and the FastFreeze had me mash the fruit inside the container.

What I looked for

User experience

I noted how intuitive each appliance was to use and how much effort each one required of the user. Two of the three machines needed nothing more than a button press; one required manual processing throughout.

Settings

Each machine offers a range of presets for different frozen treats. I especially valued models with a dedicated mix-ins setting and a re-spin option for pints that needed more processing time.

Storage and maneuverability

No one wants to have to store a huge, heavy appliance if they can avoid it, so I took into account each model’s size and weight. Ultimately, the largest and heaviest model produced the best ice cream and sorbet, but I made sure to consider the other models’ dimensions when writing them up.

Cleanup

Cleaning any appliance with a blade can be tricky, so I appreciated it when models were easy to disassemble and had dishwasher-safe components.

Cost

The models I tested ranged from $120 to $230, and price factored into my overall assessment.

Ice cream quality

The most important factor in my evaluation of these models was, of course, the quality of th frozen treats they produced. Was the ice cream creamy and scoopable? Were mix-ins properly distributed throughout the pint? Was the sorbet smooth and dense? I looked for models that delivered scoop shop-worthy results in both tests.

How do these machines differ from traditional ice cream makers?

There are two types of traditional ice cream makers: compressor and canister-style. Both of these work by churning an ice cream (or sorbet, or froyo) base in a freezing cold environment and feature a paddle that scrapes tiny ice crystals off the walls of the machine while aerating the mixture. The Creami, Chill, and FastFreeze work differently: A spinning blade pushes up and down through a cylinder of frozen liquid, shaving it into thin layers until it becomes smooth and homogenous. The process introduces less air than traditional churning, producing a denser, incredibly smooth result.