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It's nearly soup season. I immersed myself in 9 popular hand blender models to find the best overall stick blender, best value pick and best cordless model for 2022.

Senior Editor / Home and Kitchen

I live in Brooklyn where I write about food subscriptions, cooking, kitchen gadgets and commerce. Anything with sesame is my all-time favorite food this week.

For soup makers, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more useful tool than the immersion blender, although the Dutch oven makes a strong case. Sometimes called a hand blender or stick blender, these compact kitchen tools are able to puree ingredients right inside your pot or Dutch oven, saving you time and the hazard of transferring hot liquids into a traditional blender . Immersion blenders with whisk attachments can also make homemade whipped cream in seconds and many come with food chopper cups fitted with blades to turn your immersion blender into a small food processor . 

If you're unsure of how much you'll use this kitchen gadget , you might spring for the $60 Cuisinart Smart Stick hand blender, which does a fine job for not a ton of money. But for habitual soup, sauce and dip makers, I recommend the $120 Breville Control Grip   as it combines power and precision, is super simple to operate and comes with four excellent attachments. KitchenAid's excellent model is my pick for the best cordless hand blender. And for power users with a little coin to spare, the Vitamix Immersion Blender is a monster with 625 watts of power but will run you $150 for the blender alone. 

After many hours of blending, whipping and chopping (and a whole lot of leftover soup), I've landed on these three models as the best immersion blenders for 2022. 

Read more: Best Blender for 2022

This was one of the pricier immersion blenders I tested but it gives a whole lot of bang for the buck. The Breville Control Grip is incredibly easy and intuitive to use and packs plenty of power, despite lower total wattage than some others on the list. It also has one of my favorite handles, which is both sturdy and comfortable. This hand blender weighs a manageable 3.8 pounds and has good balance. I also like the rubber protectors on the bottom of the blade guard, which prevent it from scratching a pot or Dutch oven.

For $120, you'll get the mighty Breville stick blender and four handy accessories: a wire whisk, food chopper bowl, large jug for mixing and an ice crusher attachment you can screw into the jug for making mixed drinks and smoothies. All of the attachments are made from extremely high-grade plastic and feel particularly durable. If you're looking for an immersion blender that can do far more than puree soups and sauces, this is the one to buy.

If a corded immersion blender feels restrictive, KitchenAid's cordless hand blender is another excellent option. It has adjustable variable speeds and plenty of power to whip potatoes, blend veggies and emulsify pesto and salad dressings with ease.

The KitchenAid was one of the easiest to attach and operate with a comfortably placed safety switch on the backside of the handle. I also love the look and feel of this stick blender with its durable matte-plastic build. It has great weight distribution and is a true pleasure to use. This basic cordless immersion blender with mixing cup can be had for $100. It will run you closer to $160 if you choose the bundle with a whisk, food chopper attachment and blending cup.

Worth noting that you can't use this model if it's uncharged, since it can only be plugged in while the blade is detached. It takes 20 minutes or so to achieve a full charge, which gives you two hours of use. In a pinch, you can certainly charge it for five or 10 minutes and still get enough battery life for most hand blender tasks. 

You can purchase this formidable hand blender along with a whisk, chopper and mixing cup, all for $60 in gray and $70 for black. Considering its excellent performance in the tests I ran, that makes it an easy pick for the best value immersion blender of the bunch. The Cuisinart sports 300 watts of power (even more than our top pick) and an easy speed control dial on top of the handle for precision blending and whipping.

If I had one complaint about this budget-friendly model, it's the placement of the safety button. It's located directly above the power button and it can be a bit awkward to hold both down at once. Compare that to the KitchenAid, which has its safety button on the back so you can use your natural grip to hold it down. For what it's worth, the Cuisinart's safety button is probably safer, since it's almost impossible to press it by accident. 

Vitamix Immersion Blender 067991 : This excellent $150 hand blender is a bit too pricey to land on the top of our list. But for power users and those looking for an immersion blender with loads of pop, the Vitamix Immersion Blender packs a whopping 625 watts. It's comfortable in the hand and performed exceedingly well in all the tests I ran on it.

Braun MQ7025X : This powerful immersion blender passed every test with flying colors and nearly landed on my list as the best immersion blender overall. It also comes with useful attachments including a food chopper and whisk. What kept it from being a top pick is its weight. At over 5 pounds, it's the heaviest stick blender I tested and was hefty enough to cause some fatigue in my arm. 

All-Clad KZ800D51 : All-Clad is best known for its top-of-the-line cookware, including our favorite set for 2022. The brand also makes small kitchen appliances, and All-Clad's hand blender is as powerful as they get. The sleek, cordless hand blender has a monster 220-volt battery and whipped the heck out of everything I put in its way. But at $230 for the blender alone (no attachments), it's just too pricey for us to recommend for most people. 

Beautiful Hand Blender : Of the cheap immersion blenders I tested, this $34 2-speed model performed the best, and it's a solid choice if you're seeking a true budget buy. While the all-plastic build wasn't my favorite, the blade attached securely and blended well, especially when compared to some of the other stick blenders under $50.

Homgeek Hand Blender H32275US : I had high hopes for this inexpensive hand blender since it had a sturdier build than the Beautiful Hand Blender and variable speed control for precision work. But it underperformed when it came to the basic function of pureeing cooked vegetables, leaving too many chunks for my liking after two minutes of work

Bella Immersion Blender 14460 : This budget hand blender felt cheap and flimsy when I held it and the blade attachment had some worrisome wiggle when mounted. It performed acceptably, but the soup I pureed was still markedly chunkier after two minutes than other models. 

My only complaint with Cuisinart's budget-friendly immersion blender is the slightly awkward placement of the safety button. 

In testing to find the best immersion blender for 2022, I ran several tests on each model over the course of a week and took note of how well each performed. I also took into account other attributes like size, weight, sturdiness, how easy the blender was to clean and the various modes and number of speeds at which it ran. 

Blending soups and sauces out of cooked vegetables and other ingredients is by far the most popular use for an immersion blender. I blended four cups of cooked vegetables and broth in a saucepan on the highest setting and recorded how well each one blended the ingredients after one minute, and again after an additional minute. 

The $30 Homgeek hand blender did OK in the soup test but left far more unblended vegetables than many of its counterparts.

With the exception of the cheap blenders under $40, all of the models I tested had no trouble pureeing the veggies into soup within a few minutes, but some created a slightly smoother soup in less time. The best of them not only pureed the vegetables in two minutes but even began frothing the liquid toward the end of the allotted time. Some of the cheaper models required more than two minutes to get all the chunks pureed.

Not all the immersion blenders I tested offered attachments like a whisk or chopping bowl. For those with a whisk, I made a batch of this popular dessert topping using one-half a cup of whipping cream and noted how each batch looked after one minute of whipping and again after two. Here, I was looking for the blender to make dense-yet-fluffy whipped cream as quickly as possible.

For any hand blender with a whisk attachment, I made a batch of whipped cream. The Cuisinart made the fluffy stuff in under two minutes.

Several of the models in our test range also include a food-processor attachment. For those that did, I chopped one cup of carrots and celery, diced into roughly one-inch chunks. After 10 seconds of chopping, I photographed the resulting pile of chopped carrots and noted which delivered the smallest and most uniform results. Most of the stick blenders with food processor cups fared well in this test, including the $34 Beautiful Hand Blender, but some did the job a few seconds faster.

The $34 Beautiful hand blender did an excellent job pulverizing a cup of carrots and celery in under 10 seconds.

This test is more subjective than the others, but I made sure to handle each immersion blender for several minutes noting the overall weight, balance and sturdiness of the stick blenders. I did the same as I was using them in the various tests. 

The more expensive models including the KitchenAid, Braun, Breville and Vitamix all felt well-balanced and solid, giving me confidence that they wouldn't break or become loose with regular use. The cheaper models didn't elicit quite the same confidence, and some felt as if one fall to the kitchen floor might mean an early demise. 

Budget hand blenders under $40, including the Bella, lose something in the way of performance and sturdy build.

While additional attachments aren't necessary, to get the most out of your immersion blender, a few key extras are great to have. A whisk attachment will allow you to easily make whipped cream and meringue, while a food chopper will enable your hand blender to do the work of a food processor. One model I tested includes a milk frother, too, for crafting lattes and cappuccinos at home. 

The $120 Breville performed as well as any hand blender of the bunch. It also comes with four excellent attachments.

You don't necessarily need the most powerful motor to blend cooked vegetables, canned tomatoes, herbs and other classic soup and sauce ingredients. The Breville Control Grip, for instance, has only 280 watts (less than half of the ultrapowerful All-Clad) but still managed to ace every test I gave it. That said, an immersion blender with fewer than 250 watts may struggle to give you smooth results or take longer to do a blending job. 

All immersion blenders feature steel blade attachments but the handle is typically what separates the great from the not-so-great. Those built with steel or high-grade plastic were the models I liked best. Some of the cheaper stick blenders we tested were constructed using cheap plastic in the handle and they, unsurprisingly, felt a bit chintzy and prone to breakage. 

There is something to be said for choosing a cordless hand blender such as KitchenAid's excellent offering.

Hand blenders run the gamut in weight from light-as-air models under three pounds all the way up to bigger blenders that weigh more than five. Somewhere in the 2.5- to 4-pound range felt most comfortable for me. A little bit of weight helps you control the blender from spinning away, but too much heft can make an immersion blender a chore to handle deftly or use for long periods. 

The $100 Braun has power in spades and comes with excellent attachments but was noticeably heavier than the rest of the field.

Because this is a tool you might not use as regularly as others, factoring in price is important. Spending more than $120 will get you a super-premium hand blender that performs at the top of the class, but you likely don't need to spend that much to net great results. Go too cheap, and I found you lose out on hand blender performance as well as the quality of the build.

The $230 All-Clad cordless hand blender is sleek, sturdy, lightweight and ultrapowerful. But, ultimately, the cost is just too high for most people.

For most people, immersion blenders are actually something of a two- or three-trick pony. The good news is they don't take up a bunch of space. The most common use is to blend and puree ingredients inside of a pot for soups and sauces, dips, creamy mashed potatoes and baby food. Immersion blenders are also good for making homemade mayonnaise and salad dressing. 

If you choose a model that comes with a whisk attachment, making whipped cream and meringues is another use for these mobile blenders. Some also come fitted with a food processor bowl so they can do chopping too, although the capacity is typically just two or three cups so you can't do large quantities of onions, garlic and other vegetables.

You can, but I'd suggest a standard upright blender if you make smoothies regularly, as using a hand blender can be a bit clunky. If your immersion blender comes with a blending cup attachment, it will make smoothie-making quite a bit easier.

There are quality cordless and corded hand blenders, so this really comes down to personal preference. Because you probably won't be using your immersion blender every day, you might not care about the cord. A cordless blender is nice if you're motoring around the kitchen using it for multiple tasks, but you'll have to remember to charge it before or after use. 

As with most tools with an internal battery, its ability to hold a long charge is likely to wane over the years. That said, I didn't find anything about the KitchenAid or All-Clad (both cordless) suffering significant battery life issues in the many buyer reviews I scoured.