Cordless portable blenders weren’t really a thing a decade ago, or maybe even three years ago. But battery tech keeps getting better. This means the best portable blender I’ve tested, the Ninja Blast Max ($100), is now fully able to make a six-pack of crushed-ice margaritas at your next picnic or blend up a berry-filled protein shake at the gym without breaking much of a sweat. Meanwhile, the ingeniously designed Nutribullet Flip ($115) offers more torque than previous-generation blenders, plus enough insulation to keep ice frozen until it’s time for lunch (or even dinner).
Does this not jibe with your past experience with cordless blenders? Reader, I agree. It’s a young technology, and most past (and current!) cordless blenders are a disappointment, especially compared to the best blenders that plug into the wall—which are often as much as a hundred times more powerful. But I found that our two top cordless blenders were far superior to the rest, after testing eight of the most promising contenders for battery life, ice crushing, smoothie and milkshake consistency, and all-round blender vortexing.
That said, it’s worth considering whether you actually need a cordless blender for blending on the go—or just a small personal blender that performs much better and whose blending chamber can transform magically into a drinking cup to go. WIRED has been testing personal blenders for years, and our top pick, the Nutribullet Ultra ($164), just might be the high-powered, sippy-cup, office-bound solution of your dreams.
Be sure to also check out more of WIRED’s wellness-related coverage, including our guides to the Best Juicers, Best Protein Powders, and Best Workout Apps.
Table of Contents
- Best Portable Blender Overall: Ninja Blast Max
- Best Insulated Portable Blender: Nutribullet Flip
- Best Personal Blender: Nutribullet Ultra
- How We Test Portable Blenders
- How Much Power Do Cordless Blenders Have?
- Other Personal Blenders We Tested
Best Portable Blender Overall: Ninja Blast Max
The Blast Max is a titan in the pipsqueak-powered world of cordless blenders, each one the pitiful “before” in a Charles Atlas comic. In part, this is the result of sheer power, when power is measured in merely double-digit wattage. The Ninja’s 13.3-volt battery was the most powerful I tested, made possible with a proprietary charger instead of the USB-C cable favored by most cordless blenders.
The Max can make protein shakes, of course: Pretty much all of these cordless blenders can. But the cordless Ninja is also good at plowing through almond butter without jamming up. And it’s the only portable blender I tested that was able to crush ice without a running start. Indeed, it can turn cubed ice into fluffy snow without any ungainly chunks, a feat that no other cordless blender even came close to achieving. If you add tequila and a little margarita mixer and take the thing to a picnic, the results are even more satisfying.
It still takes up to three hours to charge, alas. But the Blast Max can blend for anywhere from seven to 10 drinks on a single charge, depending on how much blending is needed—enough to reliably make an octet of blended cocktails or smoothies. The trio of blender settings also sets the Blast Max apart, from an efficacious ice crush setting to an AI setting that adjusts power according to the resistance of the various ingredients.
My colleague Adrienne So has told me that the Ninja Blast Max’s predecessor, the max-less Ninja Blast, was a life-changing addition to her morning rituals when it arrived in the doldrums of 2023. The specs on the new Max means it may change lives nearly twice as much.
Best Insulated Portable Blender: Nutribullet Flip
Portable blenders have a very simple problem: Ice. Ice is what provides a lot of the satisfying texture that makes smoothies fun. But if you’re going somewhere without power, you’re probably also going somewhere without a freezer. This Nutribullet Flip, quite cleverly, solves this problem by using the same double-walled vacuum technology that keeps your coffee hot and your water cold in your favorite travel mug.
Filled halfway with ice and only ice, the Nutribullet Flip was able to keep most of its ice intact after eight hours, in my testing. Adding a liquid complicates matters, of course, unless the liquid already happens to be ice-cold. But as long as most of the constituents in the blender are chilled, you have a pretty good chance of making it to lunch with some ice cubes still intact.
That’s not the only ingenious design element in the Flip. Most portable blenders require that you unscrew the vessel from the blender before adding a drinkable lid, requiring you to keep track of extra parts and potentially causing spills if you forget to flip the thing appropriately as you unscrew it. (You may think you won’t do this, until you do so anyway and are sad.) The Flip avoids this problem entirely by adding a little hinged drinking spout to the blending base: When you flip the blender over, it’s an adult sippy cup.
The Flip, with its 11-volt battery, is more powerful than the previous generation of cordless blenders but still less powerful than our top-pick Blast Max. This means it’s more likely to bog down on ice if you load ingredients in the wrong order. Since the insulated blending jug is opaque, this’ll also require that you remember to load ice into the blending jug first before adding softer ingredients. But the thermal insulation may still make the Flip the most useful portable blender for those who want to blend a fresh smoothie at work or on the go.
Best Personal Blender: Nutribullet Ultra
It’s quite possible that you never needed a portable blender in the first place. Ask yourself an important question: Did you actually need to blend your smoothie somewhere other than at home? Or did you just want the convenience of a small blender whose chamber doubles as a portable drinking cup that you can take with you out the door?
It’s possible a personal blender might suit your needs better than a lower-wattage portable one. Most cordless blenders top out at less than 15 watts. WIRED’s top-pick personal blender, the Nutribullet Ultra, is stylish, smartly designed, compact, and convenient—and it will make fast mince of ice, frozen fruits, and every manner of nut butter as long as you make sure you have the prerequisite amount of liquid in your blending jug. It has a particular ability to make beautifully smooth-textured hummus, a feat you will achieve with precisely zero cordless blenders. It’ll mess up some leafy greens. It’ll make a mean pesto.
Whatever smoothie or protein shake concoction you, you can just pop off the blending jug, slap a sippy-cup lid on it and jet to the car. Brilliant. That said, though it’s quite compact and convenient at home, you probably won’t cart this thing around on an airplane or hiking trip. It’s more portable in the car-trunk sense.
Frequently Asked Questions
How We Test and Choose Blenders
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In general, I use some of the same tests for portable blenders as in our guide to other blenders. I test the blender’s ability to crush ice, and to make smoothies laden with protein powders and nut butters and frozen vegetables. I make frozen cocktails (in this case margaritas) to test usefulness at picnics. And I float baby carrots in water to see if the blender can generate a sufficient vortex to suck down and blend the baby carrots.
In all cases, I check the consistency and character of smoothies and shakes and frozen drinks: Is there pulp and water, or is it a pleasantly uniform texture? Is the blended ice sufficiently broken up, or are there chunks?
For cordless smoothies, I also test the charge time and the battery life. This means charging each blender from dead, to see how long it takes to reach full battery life. And it means blending until the battery is dead again, to see how many smoothies I could likeley make before running out of power.
I also assess ease of use: Some portable blenders require you to keep track of lids and other accessories. Some don’t. Some come with a charging block. Some require you to have one.
How Much Power Do Cordless Blenders Have?
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Makers of blenders that plug ito the wall love to brag about how powerful their blenders are. After all, the power comes from your wall socket, so it’s pretty easy to get up to 900 or 1,200 watts. Makers of portable blenders tend to be more circumspect, because the numbers are much a smaller. Cordless blenders tend to have the same Lithium-ion battery technology, and the same theoretical max power, of your average cordless beard trimmer—which is to say, closer to 10 watts than 1,000 watts.
In general, the lower power of these small blenders means they don’t have quite as much torque, and are less able to do useful things like crush ice and create a powerful blender vortex. Thus, most cordless blenders require in their instructions that you add a sufficient quantity liquid to the bottom of the blending jug to help create a blending vortex to mix up ingredients. Most also ask that you layer softer ingredients on the bottom and frozen ingredients on the top, so that the blades can get sufficinetly revved up before being called upon to shred a frozen carrot.
Other Personal Blenders We Tested
Beast Cordless Go for $114: The Beast Cordless Go is probably the closest runner-up to the Ninja Blast Max in power and capability—and it maybe even had the edge in achieving a consistent, satisfying texture for fruit smoothies. But the Beast didn’t crush ice nearly as well as the Blast Max. And its wider, straight-walled blending chamber was more likely to bog down or spin uselessly, requiring you to stop, shake, and start again. This then uses up more battery power and cuts the number of drinks you can expect to make with it.
Ninja Blast for $55: Ninja’s previous-generation portable blender, which charges via USB-C, is still on the market and eminently affordable, and its blending vessel and lid are dishwasher-safe. It’s also tiny enough to earn a permanent home on WIRED editor Adrienne So’s counter before its blade gave up after two years. But charge capacity is nowhere near as good as the next-generation Blast Max, and neither is the blending power.
Nutribullet Flex for $70: This Nutribullet has fun colors and a few convenient features, namely the ability to detach the blending jug from the base without incident. But the 7-volt battery just doesn’t quite have the necessary capacity or power to blend, and it has a tendency to just give up when faced with ice.
Nutribullet Portable Blender for $55: The base model of Nutribullet’s portable blender is economically priced, but faces the same problems as the Flex: Its 7-volt battery just kinda doesn’t have (or keep) enough power, and can bog down against ice.
Dash Personal Charging Blender for $40: Dash makes a habit out of creating surprisingly useful, somewhat cute appliances that cost far less than you’d expect. But while the $40 price is nice, the blender’s tiny blade isn’t overly useful for crushing ice or making a blender vortex, and the cordless blender base doesn’t hold much of a charge.
Blendjet 2 Bundle for $60: Leaving aside a somewhat troubling recall of nearly 5 million BlendJet blenders sold between 2020 and 2023 that could potentially overheat and catch fire, my colleague Boutayna Chokrane’s experience with underpowered, undersized BlendJet blenders left her suspicious of the entire category of portable blenders.
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