DeLonghi Magnifica Duo Review: The Best Value Under $1,000?

DeLonghi has released an automatic espresso machine that attempts to Do It All™️: hot coffee, cold coffee, cold milk foam, and cold brew. For under $1000. A very big deal, since most machines that achieve this at the touch of a button cost double or more. So we got one to test whether it really does it all or if it promises far more than it delivers.

The Magnifica Duo continues DeLonghi’s track record of releasing espresso machines that are great value for money, just not the best at any one thing. The espresso is good, the iced drinks work well, the “cold brew” is decent, and the hot and cold(er) milk are both excellent. You can find machines that do any one of these things better than the Magnifica Duo, but I don’t think you’ll find one (yet) that does all of it this well for this price.

Sure, it’s not the best-looking machine in the world; you can’t fine-tune the cold drinks; and the buttons and screen feel a little janky to use. But it’s probably the best $1000 you can spend on a super-automatic espresso machine, if you’ll use all of the features.

We’ve consumed more milky coffee while testing the Magnifica Duo over the last month than we have in years. There’s a surprising amount to play with, and a lot of marketing claims to test out. Here’s how it did:

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✅ Buy the DeLonghi Magnifica Duo if:

• You want a bit of everything: Espresso, cappuccino, cold brew, iced latte, flat white, black coffee. If you like to switch between your drinks, the Magnifica Duo has 17 pre-programmed drinks for you to choose from.
• Milky iced drinks are a go-to coffee choice. There aren’t many machines that offer cold milk foam. If a foamed iced cappuccino sets your sleepy heart alight, this is the one.
• Choice matters more than absolute quality. You can get machines that make better espresso, better milk, or better cold drinks for the same price or less. But you won’t find one that does all three as well as the Magnifica Duo.
• Simplicity is important to you. You don’t need to trawl through multiple settings menus on the Magnifica Duo and spend weeks learning how to use it. Just choose the strength and size of your drink, and you’re good to go.

❌ Skip it if:

• You’re mostly a black coffee drinker. The Magnifica Duo comes with two milk carafes (one hot, one cold), which is an unnecessary expense if you don’t touch the white stuff. You can find better hot espresso-only machines for much less.
• You don’t drink cold coffee. The collection of iced coffee options is one of the main selling points of the Magnifica Duo. If you’re not a fan, look elsewhere (like our roundup of the best espresso machines under $1000).
• You want to fine-tune your iced coffees. There isn’t a lot of choice when brewing iced coffee: you can only choose “Original” or “Intense” strength, then how much ice you want. If that’s not enough for you, then this isn’t the right machine.

1. 17 Coffee Options

Like all the top automatic espresso machines, the marketing literature boasts a slightly higher number – 20. But that includes 3 you’re unlikely to drink on their own: hot water, hot milk, and cold foam.

17 is still impressive, and it covers most people’s go-to drinks:

Hot Drinks

• Espresso
• Double espresso
• Drip coffee (closer to an Americano/lungo than actual drip coffee)
• Americano
• Latte
• Cappuccino
• Latte macchiato
• Flat white
• Coffee crema

Cold Drinks

• Cold brew
• Iced coffee
• Iced latte
• Iced cappuccino
• Iced Americano
• Iced espresso
• Iced flat white
• Iced latte macchiato

6 drinks have designated buttons, making them “one-touch”, and the rest can be accessed via the “more cold drinks” or “more hot drinks” menus, respectively. We’ve noticed that DeLonghi change which drinks have their own buttons to suit regional markets so the options may look different if you’re in the EU vs US.

2. Hot and Cold Milk Foam

It includes two milk carafes, one for hot and one for cold, allowing you to have the right temperature of milk for each drink. This puts it ahead of one of our favorite DeLonghi models, the Rivelia, which costs more and makes you pay an add-on for the cold LatteCrema carafe.

Both carafes have a dial to adjust how much foam you get for the drink you’re making.

The cold milk carafe doesn’t actually produce cold milk foam; when we probed it, the milk came out at around 68°F (20°C). But, for making iced coffees, this is still far better than using the hot LatteCrema system that comes out around 130°F (55°C).

3. Cold Brew and Iced Coffee Recipes

The iced coffee is brewed only slightly cooler than the hot coffee and is designed to be poured over ice. The Magnifica Duo will tell you how many ice cubes to add to chill the drink, and it’s pretty good at it.

The cold brew (which is “cold brew-style” coffee as opposed to a true version, which would take 12+ hours) is brewed even cooler than the other iced drinks, though still above ambient temperature. It takes a couple of minutes to brew, and the result is smoother and sweeter than the iced coffee options.

4. Customization Options for Hot Drinks

The hot drinks offer 5 strength settings and 4 size settings, letting you quickly and easily customize your favorite coffee. If it’s still not hitting the spot, you can also fully customize the size of your finished drink using the “my” button and save it for future use.

Cold drinks are another story: the only thing you can change is the intensity (“Original” or “Intense”) and whether you want to use the standard amount of ice or more.

5. 3 User Profiles

You can save 3 distinct recipes for each hot coffee option across three different user profiles. So you don’t need to check who last poured a flat white to know what will come out of your DeLonghi Magnifica Duo. Just make sure it’s on your user profile before you start.

6. 13 Grind Settings

The stainless steel conical burr grinder has 13 grind settings for fine-tuning your coffee flavor, which you can access from inside the bean hopper. It’s unlikely you’ll need to adjust this all that often, and we’d recommend starting on grind setting 3, then adjusting from there to suit your beans and flavor preference. For most people, the sweet spot will sit between 3 and 4.5.

The thing that took us the longest to get used to is that the screen is display-only, not a touchscreen. You need to use the buttons to indicate your choice, but we kept tapping the screen.

The relative lack of customization options on the main screen also helps simplify things. Choose a drink, choose 1 of 5 strengths, and choose one of 4 sizes (listed as S, M, L, and XL). Done. Even less for cold drinks. If it’s a milk drink, it will tell you where to set the dial for the foam level. This is either a good or a bad thing, depending on how granular you want to get with your coffee’s flavor.

Whilst not having numbers, sliders, or any extra steps makes getting a coffee from the Magnifica Duo really easy, the downside is that it’s not really clear what you’re going to get. Like, what size is a Medium, or what dose is a strength of ‘3’? I’m not a fan of this, but as my wife constantly reminds me, we’re not the target audience for this espresso machine.

Hot Coffees

To fine-tune any of the hot coffees, there’s the “my” button. This gives you the same 5 intensity (dose) options, but then you can program the length of your drink (how much water goes through the puck, and therefore how strong or weak it actually tastes). You get a reasonable amount of flexibility – for espresso, you can choose anything from 20ml (0.7oz) to 180ml (6.1oz). We’d recommend using a scale so you don’t have to eyeball it, and remember the amount of ground coffee is the same, so the max size will be closer to dirty dishwater than drinkable espresso.

Within a couple of coffees, you should be able to get exactly what you want. And if the pre-programmed options are already good for you, you don’t need to touch this button at all.

Cold Coffees

The iced coffee drinks don’t offer much in terms of customization. You can only choose between two settings for the amount of ice, and either “original” or “intense” for the flavor profile. You can’t use the “my” button.

We’d like a lot more choice than that, but we still enjoy the drinks on the “intense” and “more ice” settings. As a general rule, we always want shorter and stronger coffees than super-automatics make by default.

It houses the same internal brewing unit that’s in other DeLonghi Magnifica machines (including the more expensive Magnifica Plus and Magnifica Evo Next). So we were expecting similar quality, middle-of-the-road espresso. And that’s exactly what we got.

The espresso is definitely a big upgrade over something like a Nespresso machine or even a Philips machine. We got some rich, chocolatey shots that were nicely balanced and had some fruit notes. But you’re never going to get great nuance, complexity, and subtle notes – that’s not what these machines are for.

The drip coffee is confusingly named, as it’s not a traditional drip in either method or flavor. Instead, it uses 2 brewing cycles to stop the longer coffee from becoming thin and watery. Compared to a traditional drip coffee machine, it’s not as aromatic and does have a crema as it’s brewed under pressure.

Unfortunately, the iced coffees aren’t quite as good as the hot ones. This problem isn’t unique to DeLonghi; iced espresso tends to be a little bitter with muted fruit notes. (Don’t confuse iced espresso with cold brew; the latter is smoother and sweeter in style.) While it’s not great on its own, adding milk (like an iced latte or iced cappuccino) mellows out those bitter notes, making it an enjoyable and refreshing coffee.

The “cold brew” function is a little different. It’s brewed much colder than the other coffees (around 120°F / 50°C) and takes a couple of minutes. It’s quite loud, and you can hear that it’s running a totally different program. The result is much better than the iced versions for black coffee: a little sweeter, more chocolatey, and much more balanced.

Our Magnifica Duo Settings

We settled on the following for a single espresso using a medium-dark roast espresso blend:

Finding the right volume for your taste preferences is the longest part of dialing in the Magnifica Duo. The rest is what we’ve come to expect from testing other DeLonghi machines.

The quality of automated milk, across the board, is so high these days. And we still consider DeLonghi’s LatteCrema system to be one of the best out there. It’s capable of producing nice, small bubbles and smooth foam. Plus, you can customize your foam level to get the texture you want for your coffee.

Using the Hot LatteCrema system, we got lovely texture, from milky lattes with barely a whisper of microfoam on top, all the way to proper, classic cappuccinos with a big cap of dense, stiff foam. The only drink that left us wanting was flat white: the microfoam was never quite right.

The real test was the cold milk system. Now the milk isn’t “cold”… unless you think around 68°F is cold, I guess. But when added to a glass full of ice, it doesn’t melt too much or dilute the overall drink. The foam is pretty good, though it doesn’t last as long as hot foam does. So your iced cappuccino or latte macchiato will sink a little over time (if you don’t drink it fast enough).

But overall, we liked it; having the two milk systems work to this standard is very impressive at the price point.

The DeLonghi grinder isn’t the best in an automatic machine at this price. By comparison, Gaggia uses a flat-burr ceramic grinder, which is superb. That said, the grinder is still well-designed for the machine, and you avoid the staleness of pre-ground coffee.

For the best results, we recommend sticking with medium or medium-dark roast beans that are fresh. You can stray into dark roast territory as long as they’re not too oily, because the oils can damage the grinder. This is the same for flavored beans. Light roasts aren’t necessarily a complete write-off, but it’s unlikely you’ll get good results from the Magnifica Duo, as they need a higher temperature and finer grind.

Grind setting 3 is a solid place to start; then you can fine-tune your settings from there to suit your beans. Not having to start at the finest setting is usually a good sign that the machine will work with a wide variety of beans.

You can use pre-ground coffee in the dedicated chute if you need to. We tend to use this when we need a decaf and don’t want to swap out all the beans.

The Looks

This is purely a personal preference, but we don’t like DeLonghi machines with the little light-up drink icon buttons. They look a little cheap and gimmicky to our eyes. Maybe that’s harsh, as the rest of the machine looks really nice. Don’t let our dislike discourage you from buying the Magnifica Duo.

The plastic exterior is designed to look like brushed stainless steel, and it looks good. It also doesn’t show every mark and fingerprint like some other machines.

The Build

DeLonghi has a great reputation for building reliable espresso machines. Many people, including my in-laws (the Magnifica Start), have had the same DeLonghi super-automatic for 5+ years with no problems at all.

Like most super-automatic espresso machines, the Magnifica Duo is made almost entirely from plastic. If you want metal, you’ll need to look at the Breville lineup instead. Despite that, everything feels well engineered:

All the parts fit together nicely; nothing rattles or is loose, and nothing feels like it might break with normal use. If you drop a full drip tray of water on the floor, it may not survive, but that’s probably not unique to DeLonghi either.

It is relatively compact (as these machines go), at 9.5 inches wide and 14 inches high. Unless you have really low cabinets, you shouldn’t have any issues accessing the top-loading bean hopper. It’s 17.5 inches deep, which is about standard for this type of espresso machine.

DeLonghi also offers a 2-year warranty as standard, with an extra year if you buy and register the product with them. A 3-year warranty on a coffee machine is about as good as it gets.

The main reason I like a milk hose with no carafe is that I hate cleaning milk carafes. Nothing is more likely to go nasty and cause cleanliness issues with your coffee machine than the milk system. The Magnifica Duo has two of them to keep on top of.

After each milk drink, the Magnifica Duo will prompt you to rinse the milk tube; this involves putting a cup under the spout and the machine pumping hot water through the nozzle. It’s absolutely critical to do this, even if it is annoying. It means you can return the carafe to the fridge, and it’ll last a couple of days before you need to fully clean it out.

The carafes are both dishwasher-safe on a low-temperature wash.

Aside from having twice as much milk carafe cleaning, the rest of the Magnifica Duo is fairly standard. The cleaning routine for the DeLonghi Duo looks something like this:

Daily: Rinse milk dispensers after each milk drink, empty drip tray and spent pucks

Weekly: Clean coffee spouts; soak and rinse the hot water spout and drip tray

Periodic: Deep clean the internal components with a branded tablet (it takes around 10 mins). Descale every 2 months or so; it takes 25 mins and the machine will tell you when it needs to be done and what to do.

There are plenty of great espresso machines around the $1000 mark. The competition offers machines that do less, but maybe do it a little better than the Magnifica Duo.

Gaggia Magenta Prestige

You save a decent amount of money, but sacrifice some features.

The Gaggia Magenta Prestige offers a lot of quality and features for a brilliant price. With Gaggia’s superior grinder, we think it’s possible to get better espresso from the Magenta Prestige than from any of the DeLonghi machines around the same price. The milk quality is superb, if a little too foamy for flat white, and the drinks menu covers the 10 big hitters you’re likely to want.

However, you don’t get any iced coffee options, and you definitely don’t get cold milk foam.

At RRP, it’s around $100 cheaper than the Duo, but that’s a lot of extras to get for $100.

If you’re not interested in iced coffee, then maybe the Magenta Prestige will work for you as a slightly cheaper machine that will produce better-tasting coffee than the DeLonghi. But overall, the Duo offers so much more for the price that the slight loss of coffee quality won’t matter to most people.

Read next: Our complete Gaggia Magenta Prestige review

KitchenAid KF3

Better-looking and better-tasting coffee, but you lose a lot of options.

The KitchenAid KF3 uses a much larger dose than either the Gaggia or the DeLonghi, 15g vs 11.5g. This means there’s the possibility of greater depth of flavor and nuance in the espresso shots. The milk also adjusts the foam levels automatically to the drink you’re making, instead of you setting a dial. This can be good, as you don’t need to do anything, or bad since you can’t tweak the foam yourself.

We also prefer having a milk hose rather than a carafe, because I really do hate cleaning out milk carafes.

You do get a couple of iced coffee options, but in general, your options are far more limited with the KitchenAid KF3 (11 drinks) than with the Magnifica Duo (17 drinks). It retails at the same price as the DeLonghi, too.

It’s a relatively simple choice:

Do you want fewer drinks, no cold foam, but a better-looking machine that brews better coffee? Or would you rather sacrifice a little espresso quality and aesthetics for all those extra drink options?

Read next: Our complete KitchenAid KF3 review

As we’ve come to expect from DeLonghi, it boils down to: this is a lot of features for the price.

If you want hot and cold milk drinks for under $1000, then this is a no-brainer machine for you. Nothing else does as many options, as well, at a few touches of a button.

You will trade off some things; it’s not the absolute best espresso you can get for this money. It’s not the most aesthetically pleasing machine you can get for this money. And you’ll need to clean multiple milk containers every couple of days, which I find extremely annoying, though they are dishwasher-safe.

But it’s reliable and offers fantastic value for money… if you actually use all the features. This is an espresso machine to suit all tastes, especially in the modern-day iced coffee tsunami.