Best Personal Blenders for Solo Smoothies and Other Small Jobs (2025)

Good to know: For an additional $80, you can upgrade to the Nutribullet Ultra Plus+ Compact Kitchen System, which includes the motor base, two blending cups with to-go lids, as well as coffee/spice grinder (keep it for spices, use a burr grinder for coffee) and mini food processor attachments.

The Nutribullet Ultra making short work of the pesto recipe.

Alaina Chou

The Best Budget Personal Blender: Zwilling Enfinigy Personal Blender

What we love: If you’re looking to spend a little less on your smoothie endeavors, this model from Zwilling earned the top spot in the personal blender category for years and rings in at just two thirds the price of the Nutribullet Ultra. While it’s significantly less powerful at 500 watts, it still did a great job at whizzing through ingredients in our testing.

The Zwilling is one of the most stylish personal blenders we’ve come across, with a sleek, well-constructed base, intuitive knob-controlled interface, and chic fluted blending cup. It has two modes. Turn the control knob to the right to activate the automatic smoothie setting, or hold it down to the left to run the manual blend/pulse mode.

In testing, it took just two 40-second automatic blend cycles to produce a creamy green smoothie, and about a minute to achieve a luscious, smooth pesto. While not quite as effective as the Ultra, the Zwilling did a great job at both of these tests. It broke down tough kale stems and left no garlic chunks or stray basil leaves in the pesto.

While the Zwilling only comes with one blending cup, it does include a flip top travel lid for transporting your smoothies on the go.

What we’d leave: We wish this model came with at least one additional blending cup—if you want one, you’ll have to buy it as a set that comes with another sippy lid and a vacuum sealed cap for $40. At 20 ounces, the blending jar is also smaller than the ones the Nutribullet comes with. This is fine for your average smoothie, but if you’re looking to do slightly larger tasks in your blender, it’s something to note.

The Zwilling Enfinigy making a batch of pesto.

Alaina Chou

How We Tested Personal Blenders

To test personal blenders, we first put them to work making green smoothies full of fibrous kale (with the stems), frozen blueberries, frozen mango, and a splash of almond milk. Then we made batches of classic pesto to see how well each blender handled a mix of leafy basil, pine nuts, garlic, olive oil, and cheese.

We evaluated the blenders based on the following criteria:

Other Personal Blenders We Tried

I really wanted to like this new model from Beast. For one, it’s a looker, with its pretty ribbed cups and range of color options. I also appreciated that it came with three different sized cups and a range of useful lids (including one with a straw), and that it has a comparably compact base. Which is why I was sorely disappointed when I had to run the thing ten times to get my smoothie to blend properly—so many times, in fact, that steam (!) came out when I finally went to open the lid. Given its 850-watt motor I was honestly surprised. It fared slightly better in the pesto test, but still took a couple cycles to fully blend. Unless you’re an “aesthetics above all else” kind of person who doesn’t mind a warm smoothie, I’d pass on this model—especially given its $140 price tag, just $10 less than our top pick.

The Nutribullet Pro is essentially two steps down from the Nutribullet Ultra. It has a powerful 1000-watt motor, comes with two blender cups and lids, and has those same grippy suction cups to keep it secured to the counter. We didn’t love the twist-to-blend functionality, ultimately preferring the touchscreen controls of the Ultra. And while the Pro did well in the pesto test, the smoothie it made was quite chunky.

This Ninja blender comes with two cups for smoothies and sauces, plus a “nutri-bowl.” The bowl comes with a “power paddle” meant to be turned by hand while the machine is running to create better textured smoothie and acai bowls, but we didn’t find it very effective. While this model made a great smoothie, we found it difficult to gauge how long to blend our pesto, and docked points for its very loud motor.

While Magic Bullet blenders are made by Nutribullet, we found that this one’s performance paled in comparison to the Nutribullet models we tried. At only 250 watts, its motor just wasn’t powerful enough to achieve the creamy, chunk–free smoothies we were after.

We also tried the Black+Decker FusionBlade, which has since been discontinued.

What about rechargeable portable blenders?

We’ve tested a number of these cordless blenders that proliferate in many people’s social media feeds (you can check them out in action here) and the truth is, they just aren’t powerful enough to succeed in any of our blender tests. They’re…fine if all you’re making are protein shakes. But we advise against them in general.

What To Make In A Personal Blender

Smoothies are the obvious answer here, but that’s not all you can make in a personal blender. Put yours to work whizzing up punchy salsa verde, lump-free crepe batter, salad dressings, hummus, small batches of summer gazpacho, or even homemade baby food.

Other Blenders We Love