These Are Our Editors' Favorite Outdoor Pizza Ovens from Ooni, Solo Stove, Gozney and More

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While we love tending to the grill and gathering around a fire pit, theres something we (and your guests) may love even more: piping hot, gooey pizza on demand. Baking a pie in the oven can yield good results, but there’s nothing like the crunchy crust and smoky flavor of a pizza made in a proper hearth. If you’re hoping to replicate your favorite restaurant’s pie, an outdoor pizza oven can take your homemade slices from decent to genuinely artisan.

Standalone and countertop outdoor pizza ovens reach much higher temperatures than regular ovens, and in less time. That high heat is exactly what you need for a perfectly cooked pizza crust—and several of the models we tested can cook up a pie in as little as 60 seconds.

Plus, many of the best outdoor pizza ovens we write about are suited for cooking for other tasty foods, just like a real hearth. You can make fish, meat, roasted vegetables, and even bread in these wood-fired and gas-fueled models.

The Best Outdoor Pizza Ovens

• Best Overall: Ooni Karu 16

• Best Budget Option: Big Horn Outdoors Pizza Oven

• Best for Beginners: Solo Stove Pi Prime Pizza Oven

• Best for Neapolitan Pizza: Ooni Karu 12

• Best Design: Gozney Roccbox Outdoor Pizza Oven

What to Consider

How Outdoor Pizza Ovens Work

Outdoor pizza ovens use gas or wood to create flames across the top that radiate intense heat downwards, heating the pizza stone—like preheating an oven in your house. However, unlike your home oven, outdoor pizza ovens can reach up to 950 degrees Fahrenheit.

Once the outdoor pizza oven hits cooking temperature and your pizza is placed inside, it only takes a couple of minutes to cook. The pizza stone or oven floor gets to the same temperature as the roof so the pizza cooks fast and even. While it cooks, those flames up top produce a golden crust that’s crispy on the outside and soft and airy on the inside. Because the pizza only takes a minute or so to cook, you can make a few with different toppings one after another.

Fuel Type

Wood is the traditional fuel of choice for pizza ovens, favored for the smoky flavor it imparts in the crust and toppings. However, wood (or charcoal) fires take longer to heat up and require more attention to maintain the right temperature. That may not be an issue if you’re only making a couple of pies, but it can become a hassle if you’re cooking multiple pies for a large group, or entertaining a party while you cook.

Propane fuel can heat a pizza oven up quickly with just the turn of a knob. The convenience of firing up the oven on high and being ready to cook a pie within 15 minutes is hard to deny, as is the ease of clean-up when there’s no ashy firebox to empty. However, propane ovens won’t give you the wood-fired flavor.

Luckily, you don’t have to pick just one: A few of the brands we recommend offer extra accessories you can buy to accommodate a different fuel type. There are even some options with combined fuel, so you can heat up your oven fast with the propane and imbue the pizza with wood-fired flavor, too.

Size and Temperature

The oven’s size dictates the maximum temperature the unit can reach, as well as the size pie you can cook in it. Most outdoor pizza ovens are designed for 12- or 14-inch pies. Our Best Overall pick, though, can accommodate pizzas up to 16 inches for big, restaurant-like slices.

Pizzas are typically cooked between 450 and 600 degrees Fahrenheit. Classic Neapolitan pizza requires temperatures around 900 degrees—these are the ones with golden crusts, mottled with dark leopard spots. High-end models top out at around 950 degrees Fahrenheit. The pizza ovens we recommend have max temperatures that far exceed 500 degrees, but note that an oven with a relatively low maximum temperature still gives you a delicious, cooked-through pie—it just may not look quite as picture perfect.

How We Tested

To find the best pizza ovens, we looked at models with good features and designs and called in a handful to try ourselves. We selected pizza ovens that use a variety of fuels, including gas, charcoal, and wood. Outdoor pizza ovens all pretty much come with a learning curve but we identified models best suited to beginners and pizza aficionados alike to offer a range that caters to different skill levels.

For testing, we heated each oven for 30 minutes to season them and burn off any oils or contaminants from manufacturing, then let them cool completely. Fifteen minutes after firing up each oven on high using propane burners, we measured the temperatures on the pizza stones with an infrared thermometer.

Then, we made pizza, using the same dough each time, with propane and oak firewood as our fuel. During cooking, we noted how well each oven performed, different features, and their ease of use. Finally (and most enjoyably), we assessed, a.k.a., ate, the pizza. We recommend these ovens based on our experience and, for the ovens we haven’t gotten our hands on yet, we evaluated specs, features, and user reviews to ensure their quality.

Karu 16 Multi Fuel Outdoor Pizza Oven

Over a decade ago, Ooni built its first portable pizza oven with a design that many have mimicked. The Karu 16 is capable of making 16-inch pizzas fired either with propane or wood. In testing, we liked this version’s locking door with a glass window, which kept temperature in the oven consistent and allowed us to keep an eye on our pizza while it cooked.

Ooni also added a digital thermometer to this model that monitors air temperature in the oven. Using the propane burner is super easy and gets the job done, but we appreciate the large firebox for wood, which provides a lot more flame across the top of the oven.

Outdoor Pizza Oven

This outdoor pizza oven looks like the Ooni Karu, and it’s a fraction of the price. The stainless-steel oven is fueled by wood pellets, which conveniently load in a trap door at the back—though unlike the Karu, wood is your only fuel option.

It preheats in roughly 18 minutes, reaches a maximum temperature of 860 degrees, and can cook a 12-inch pizza in up to 2 minutes or less. It’s also easy to store, weighing a reasonable 25 pounds with folding legs. One drawback—though likely not a dealbreaker—is that there’s no integrated temperature gauge.

Outdoor Pizza Oven

The East Oak Pizza Oven really surprised us with its performance during testing. It has a 12-inch rotating pizza stone—admittedly, we’ve often found these to be more of a gimmick than a feature—but the East Oak is a different story; it works very well.

Watching the pizza through the oven door, you can simply use the dial on the front to smoothly turn the pizza for a perfectly-crisped crust. East Oak also has a clever way to load more wood pellets—it uses a cylindrical drawer that’s inserted and then spun to drop pellets into the fire box. Each load of pellets burns for about 12 minutes. It takes 15 to 20 minutes to get it up to operating temperatures, so expect to use two drawers of pellets to cook your first pizza.

The oven comes with a removable door to speed up the heating process. As with all ovens that use a round pizza stone, you do have to make sure you pitch your pizza in accurately to land on it.

Roccbox Outdoor Pizza Oven

Though the Roccbox is different in shape, it still functions similarly to other ovens designed to make Neapolitan pizza. It uses propane, although a wood burner is available as an extra accessory sold separately.

Heating up the oven, we easily reached temperatures over 900 degrees on the pizza stone in 15 minutes. Although inside the oven gets very hot, we were happy to find that outside body did not. You can actually touch the oven body—on the silicone—without getting burned.

Functionally, the Roccbox performed well and we were able to make outstanding 12-inch pizza in it. The one drawback we noted was that the propane burner left a fair amount of soot on the front of the oven, above the door. While harmless, it did take us some time to clean it off when it came time to store it away.

While cooking pizza takes roughly 60 seconds in the Roccbox oven (above), you have to check and turn it every 15-20 seconds.

Pi Prime Outdoor Pizza Oven

A pizza oven from the smokeless fire pit folks? Yup—and it has the option of wood-fired or dual-fuel cooking with a propane burner. We’ve used it both ways and prefer the ease of burning propane.

As with most portable wood-fired ovens, heating it to the perfect temperature is a longer wait than with any gas model. Plus we needed to keep an eye on the fire to add more wood as it burned down. Still, it’s nice to have the choice if you’re into that authentic wood-fired taste.

It took us about 20 minutes to heat up using propane, though expect a bit more time when it’s relatively cool out and less when it’s hot. In testing, the average cook time was about 90 seconds and required turning the pie every 20 seconds or so.

We found that managing oven and stone temperatures didn’t take too much time, although like other ovens without a door, breezy or windy days could make it more challenging. The oven opening on the Pi is 13 inches wide, so 12-inch pies are about as big as this oven can handle.

Dome Outdoor Pizza Oven

While the Roccbox is a great way to get started making your own pizza, Gozney’s Dome is a versatile, upgraded option for anyone getting serious about making pizza.

Its design—while not only aesthetically pleasing, which we appreciated—also most closely resembles restaurant-grade brick pizza ovens. With a 16-inch-wide opening it can handle larger pies, and it’s not just for pizza—you can roast, steam and bake in it as well.

The Dome we tested was the dual-fuel model, using either wood or propane. It’s also available for natural gas and wood, or as a dedicated wood-fired oven. The dual-fuel is a bit pricier, but for some, the convenience of using gas is worth the extra expense.

The weight of the Dome helps it retain heat and maintain relatively stable temperatures in the oven and on the pizza stone. The large oven interior also made it easier to maneuver the pizza with a peel and gave us a wider rotating radius. The hidden ashtray is easy to clean and user-friendly features—digital thermometer, probe, igniter—are at the front of the oven.

While the Dome’s weight helps you make great pizza, this isn’t an oven you can easily whip out and breakdown, so make sure you have the space for it. It also takes at least two people to assemble (though, we used three).

No two pizza ovens work exactly the same, but we found there was almost no learning curve using the Dome for the first time. If you’re looking for a middle ground between the Roccbox and Dome, Gozney recently released the smaller, gas burning Arc model.

Volt 12 Electric Outdoor Pizza Oven

The Volt 12 is Ooni’s first electric pizza oven made for both indoor and outdoor use. While there are plenty of electric pizza ovens, there are precious few that can cook a pizza on par with a propane- or wood-fired oven. This is one of them.

We used an infrared thermometer to check temps on the pizza stone, confirming the Volt 12’s ability to hit temperatures well above 800 degrees Fahrenheit. It took just around 20 minutes to get up to ideal temps and we weren’t surprised to find pizzas cooked quickly. Our results had beautiful, mottled leoparding on the crust—just like an outdoor oven.

The Volt 12 has three controls on front: a 20-minute timer, a thermostat that maxes out 850 degrees, and a knob to adjust the upper and lower heating elements separately. While the temp balance control is a useful feature, it only works once the oven hits the set temperature. The Volt fits on a standard depth countertop and is relatively easy to move thanks to handles on each side.

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