The 4 Best Pizza Cutters of 2024, Tested & Reviewed

Oct 19, 2024

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A poor pizza cutter can ruin your pies.

In This Article

Food & Wine / Anna Lee Flaherty

As a young line cook, I turned my back on disingenuous “fine dining,” taking a job at an upscale, authentically Italian restaurant under the son of a famous Italian cookbook author instead. Starting from scratch, I had to work my way up the ladder from the bottom, as I had no reference point in this new-to-me cooking style. That meant I started on the pizza oven.

I won’t claim to be a pizzaiolo, but I did spend days and hours learning how to properly stoke the oven, make and stretch the dough, build an excellent pie, and manipulate it in the oven to reach its best potential. I also learned the importance of a pizza cutter.

I’ve felt the pain of seeing photo-worthy pizzas laid to waste by dull, clumsy cutters. A cheap, dull, or poorly designed pizza cutter can fail to slice the pizza completely, stick to the toppings, crush them, or, worse yet, snowplow right across the pie’s surface, building a bank of all the toppings to one side. To help you avoid these situations and keep your pizza looking and tasting its best, we took 25 of the most popular pizza cutters into our test kitchens to determine the best on the market today. Here are our results.

It’s lightweight, sturdy, and cuts smoothly.

The Ooni Pizza Cutter Wheel’s nylon construction and sharp wheel might suffer from repeated dishwasher cycles.

There’s a certain skepticism around companies that try to do it all. Ooni makes great pizza ovens. Can it make quality accessories, too? In a word, yes. The Ooni pizza cutter wheel is sturdy and has a comfortable nylon handle with a molded finger guard at the top of the wheel. It’s lightweight, and the sharp, large cutting wheel covers a significant surface area with each roll. How does that translate to pizza cutting? The blade slices through toppings without crushing, sticking, or dragging (as heavier cutters can). The lack of sticking means it’s easy to clean, too.

Though it’s held up in the dishwasher with no issues so far, we saw some potential for degradation over time. We’d recommend hand washing, which wasn’t a problem because some accumulated pizza grease was the only thing stuck to the cutter when we finished testing.

Material: Nylon and stainless steel | Cleaning: Dishwasher safe

It’s sturdy, sharp, and comfortable.

It was a little clumsy to clean.

The Lamson Pizza Rocker is a sturdily-built pizza cutter with a sharp, single-beveled, half-moon-shaped blade. The wooden handles that run parallel to the blade let us apply extra pressure, when needed, without feeling clumsy or unsafe. The Lamson easily cut through thin-crust flatbread but required a couple of strokes to cut through a thick-crust pie cleanly.

With the repetitive cutting necessary for a thick-crust pizza, one might expect it to crush or pull the toppings, but other than a bit of cheese adhering to the blade, this cutter sliced the pies cleanly. There were few places for food particles to stick and hide, so cleaning was easy-ish. We found the size, shape, and positioning of the two handles made the Lamson a little challenging to grasp in one hand while washing with the other.

Material: Stainless steel, wood, and brass | Cleaning: Hand wash

This Cuisinart model is comfortable and sturdy, outclassing most cutters at this price point.

A slightly thicker blade would make this cut easier.

This Cuisinart pizza cutter’s name is accurately succinct. The barrel-shaped stainless steel handle is wrapped in nylon for comfort, with a curved blade guard to protect your fingers. Overall, this cutter was sturdy, with no blade wobble, and while sharp, it didn’t leave marks or scratches on our cutting boards. It cut cleanly with one pass and no additional pressure necessary, and it didn’t smash or drag ingredients along with it. It was dishwasher-safe and, therefore, straightforward to clean. For those seeking a good, serviceable cutter at a reasonable price, the quality for dollar ratio is strong with the Cuisinart.

Material: Stainless steel and nylon | Cleaning: Dishwasher safe

The Boska is a multi-use cutter that cuts cleanly on one pass and is also good for hard cheese.

The blade is long, about 17 inches, and it may be hard to store safely in a drawer without a guard to protect your fingers and the blade.

The Boska is a sturdy, single-beveled, half-moon-style cutter with handles of differing sizes to accommodate your dominant and non-dominant hand. Both handles extend past the blade, with the longer handle in line with the blade and the smaller top mounted to keep your fingers out of danger. The blade cut cleanly with minimal pressure on the first pass, leaving the cheese and toppings intact. There were no noticeable marks on the cutting board after slicing through the pizzas, and nothing stuck to the blade. It’s hand-wash only, but that’s to protect the wood handles and the blade. The Boska is built for performance and longevity, which justifies the higher price tag.

Material: Stainless steel and wood | Cleaning: Hand wash

We can’t sum up one favorite because of the different styles, but here are our favorites in each. We liked the Ooni Pizza Cutter Wheel as our favorite round cutter for its simple design and effectiveness at a reasonable price. We also liked the Lamson Pizza Rocker for its comfort, design, and ease of use.

We try to emulate the home user experience in our testing. After removing the cutters from their packaging, we put them through a series of tests. The first test applied only to wheel-type pizza cutters. We simply rolled them back and forth on a cutting board to see how sturdy they were, checking for any wobbles in the wheel and, if so, how badly. Then, we put the cutters to work on their intended purpose, cutting pizzas. We used each cutter on various pizzas, thick, thin, and cauliflower crusts, and tested each cutter on at least one pizza with "loaded" toppings. In our final test, if the cutter was machine washable, we ran it through a wash cycle and observed any discoloration, staining, or dulling. What were we looking for?

Food & Wine / Courtney Peterson

You may strongly prefer one type of pizza cutter’s style over another. I’m a fan of rocking cutters because I can cut cleaner and faster with them, but I’m also comfortable using long-bladed knives. Consider a roller cutter if you don’t feel at ease with the bulk and heft of a rocking cutter. From there, consider what’s comfortable in your hand. The traditional roller cutters have an extended handle; some work best when held at a 90-degree angle to the pizza. Consider a palm-held model if that’s an uncomfortable way to grip the cutter. But be aware that the palm-held models are only effective to the depth of the blade guard before they start plowing the toppings off of your pizza and, therefore, best suited for thin-crust pies.

Base your size considerations on the thickness of your crust and how comfortable the pizza cutter feels. In a best-case scenario with wheeled cutters, the maximum depth they can reach is half the diameter of the cutting wheel. The blade and handle typically connect at the center of the wheel, so there are arms and hardware that will snag your toppings to deal with. Palm-held cutters usually have an even shallower depth because of their blade guards. Rocking cutters don’t suffer from this limitation, but they are bulky and clumsy to store in a drawer or cabinet. They’re also big, sharp blades to move around your kitchen and must be held one-handed while you clean them.

Some pizza cutters feel floppy and wobbly from the onset. Those qualities don’t speak well to the longevity of your cutter. Look for a solid construction and, preferably, a rivet versus a screw holding the blade to the handle. Screws will work themselves loose over time and can fall out. For rocking cutters, look for riveted or roll-top handles. A roll-top handle is one where the blade and handle are a single sheet of metal that curls over itself to form a gripping surface. In all cases, look for a medium-thick blade as an indicator of sharpness and how easily you can re-sharpen it when it dulls.

What will you cut your pizza on? A wooden cutting board is softer and easier on the blade but more prone to gouging. A cutter requiring little pressure, like a wheel cutter, is the best bet in this case unless you want to sand the cut marks out of your board regularly. Plastic cutting boards are a bit harder and can take pressure while you cut. You could use either a rocking cutter or a wheel cutter in this scenario.

You can sharpen your pizza cutter on a sharpening stone like a knife. This method is much easier with a rocking cutter, as you’re dealing with a fixed blade. You’ll need to rotate a round cutter’s blade to ensure you sharpen all parts of the cutter. Make sure you match the bevel and only sharpen one side for a single-bevel blade. Alternatives to a whetstone are a puck sharpener that you move against the blade rather than the blade against the stone or a belt grinder. You can also touch up your cutter’s blade between uses with a honing steel.

Very few things are impossible. Using a pizza cutter on a pizza stone, baking sheet, or other hard surface is not among them. There are, however, bad ideas. Using a pizza cutter on a pizza stone or hard surface will quickly dull your blade and potentially damage your stone. Moving the pizza to a cutting board or even a cardboard box that won’t damage your cutter or stone is a much better plan.

Food & Wine / Karah Rosa

Cuisinart Alfrescamore Quick Cut Pizza Cutter ($20 at Amazon)The Alfrescamore performed well in every area: design, performance, and ease of use, except cleaning. The blade was fine, but the handle trapped little bits of food and lint while washing it.

OXO Good Grips Pizza Wheel ($12 at Amazon)This cutter from OXO worked for us in most cases, but depending on the pizza’s thickness and temperature, it sometimes required a few passes to cut through the pie, causing some of the toppings to drag along with it.

Gozney Pizza Rocker ($45 at Gozney)The Gozney Pizza Rocker has a very rustic design, with aged-looking wooden handles and a wide blade. It performed well, but the design elements also provided places for bits of food to hide, making cleaning a little more complicated than it would otherwise have been.

Zyliss Pizza Wheel ($18 at Amazon)The Zyliss Pizza Wheel has a palm-held design with a plastic cover over the top of the wheel. While the cover provides control and safety, it also caught a lot of food particles that took some ingenuity to remove before putting it in the dishwasher.

Zwilling Pro Tools 18/10 Stainless Steel Pizza Cutter ($27 at Amazon)The Zwilling cutter is a study in minimalist stainless steel design. It fared well enough in our testing, but the handle wasn’t very ergonomic. The cutter’s weight compensated for that. Nevertheless, it took multiple passes to cut through pepperoni and sausage.

Dexter-Russell Sani-Safe Pizza Cutter ($24 at Amazon)There was nothing wrong with the Dexter-Russel cutter, but it didn’t quite perform as well in slicing pizzas and wasn’t quite as comfortable as our Best Wheel pick while carrying a comparable price tag.

Checkered Chef Pizza Cutter ($16 at Amazon)The Checkered Chef cutter is a clean, rocking design made from a single piece of stainless steel that curls over itself to form a handle. It’s sharp and easy to clean, but it took multiple passes and more pressure than we’d like to cut either thick or thin-crust pizzas.

When testing this many pizza cutters, not all of them could make our list of recommendations. Since the design and construction count so significantly in our ratings, the Figmint Stainless Steel Pizza Cutter fell short, with a wobbly cutting wheel that presented safety concerns. The Kitchy Pizza Cutter Wheel is a palm-held cutter that performs best on thin-crust pizza, as the blade guard catches the toppings on thick-crust or rising-crust frozen pizzas, dragging the toppings and providing an opportunity for detailed cleaning. The Williams Sonoma Olivewood Pizza Chopper was comfortable and easy on the eyes, but its dull rocking blade needed multiple attempts to cut through every pizza we tested it on.

Greg Baker is an award-winning chef, restaurateur, and food writer with four decades of experience in the food industry. His written work appears in Food & Wine, Tasting Table, Serious Eats, and other publications.