The 7 Best Outdoor Pizza Ovens for Perfect Pies in Minutes

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.

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 90 seconds 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.

A pizza oven from the smokeless fire pit folks? Yup—and it has the ease of cooking with a propane burner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.