The AG301 grills by blowing 500°F air down onto a hot grate rather than by heating it from below, and reviewers split on whether that counts. Reviewed tested burgers, chicken, salmon and strip steak and was "very impressed," reporting it "entirely smokeless throughout." Real Homes scored it 4 out of 5 and found very little smoke or cooking smell. Serious Eats, testing eight smokeless grills, concluded it behaved more like an air fryer than a grill and did not produce good grill marks. All three agree it is bulky and slow to preheat.
Full review
A Grill That Cooks With Air
The AG301 does not work the way the other grills on this page work. Rather than heating a plate from below, it uses what Ninja calls Cyclonic Grilling Technology: a heating element above the food and a fan that drives hot air down onto a grate that is itself hot. The Spruce Eats' Sharon Lehman describes the arrangement precisely — "A top-down heat source produces temperatures up to 500 degrees, and a powerful fan circulates the hot air to cook food quickly and evenly with grill-like results."
The hardware around that is substantial. Ninja's owner's guide puts it at 1,760 watts on a 120-volt supply, with four grill settings: LOW at 400°F, MEDIUM at 450°F, HIGH at 500°F and MAX reaching up to 510°F. In the box are a 10-by-10-inch ceramic-coated grill grate, a 4-quart crisper basket, a 6-quart cooking pot, a splatter shield, kebab skewers and a cleaning brush. Reviewed's description of the object itself is fair: "While this Ninja won't win any beauty contests, it still has a nice finish and high-quality feel. It's also quite heavy, so you won't want to be lifting it in and out of a cabinet very often."
Two Test Kitchens Liked It, One Did Not
This is the most contested product on the page and the disagreement is worth laying out rather than averaging away. Reviewed ran it through fresh and frozen hamburgers, chicken breasts, salmon and New York strip steaks and came away convinced: "we were very impressed. The chicken and burgers looked like they could have been done on an outdoor grill. The skin on the salmon was delightfully crisp and the top well browned, even without flipping." On steak they were more measured — "While the strip steaks didn't rival those grilled outdoors, they came out better than many steaks broiled in an oven."
Serious Eats reached the opposite conclusion. Taylor Murray included the AG301 in her test of eight smokeless grills and left it out of her picks entirely, writing in her competition section: "This machine was great—as an air fryer. While it claims to be an all-in-one model, I felt that the way it cooked on the 'grill' setting was more like an air fryer than a grill, and it just didn't provide good grill marks." Real Homes' Helen McCue, scoring it 4 out of 5, lands nearer Reviewed but with a similar reservation about where the value is: "if you don't think you'll use the grill function, you may as well save some money and look at Ninjas dedicated air fryers, most of which can also dehydrate, roast and bake."
Curved Marks, and Only on One Side
There is a physical reason the grill-marks complaint keeps recurring, and Reviewed identified it. "Although it cooks with the lid closed, the lid doesn't press down on food, so it only brands grill marks on one side at a time—if you want a panini, you'll have to turn it over halfway through cooking. The grate leaves curved grill marks rather than straight lines on food."
So the AG301 sits in an awkward middle position. It is not an open grill, where the surface below does all the marking and you flip once. It is not a contact grill either, because the lid never touches the food — the Breville BGR820XL The Smart Grill closes onto what it is cooking and marks both faces at once. The AG301 closes a dome over the food and blows air at it. That produces excellent browning, which is what Reviewed observed on chicken and salmon, but browning and grill marks are different things, and it is a defensible reading of the same evidence to say, as Serious Eats did, that the marks are not what you came for.
Eight Minutes Before You Can Start
Every reviewer measured the preheat and every one of them complained about it. Reviewed: "Although the preheat time for grilling was about eight minutes, the food cooked quickly once on," and separately, "We love the fact that the grill preheats automatically, but depending on the setting, the preheat time can be over eight minutes." Real Homes' McCue found the same on high heat — "It runs a preheat before you can start grilling, this took what felt like forever, but was actually around eight minutes" — and reported that dropping to a lower setting barely helped: "On this lower heat setting the preheat was marginally quicker, but still took seven minutes." The Spruce Eats' range was slightly wider: "Preheating took 5 to 8 minutes depending on the setting."
For comparison within this page, the Ninja Sizzle GR101 asks for seven minutes and the Zojirushi's manual specifies a four-minute preheat, with Grillseeker measuring 400°F at five minutes. Eight minutes is not disqualifying but it changes how the appliance fits into a weeknight, and it is the more irritating because the AG301's own air-fry function is dramatically quicker — McCue clocked the air fryer at three minutes to preheat, and it hit 400°F in the same three minutes when she raised it.
The Smoke Claim Holds Up
Whatever the disagreement about grill marks, nobody disputes the smoke. Reviewed's finding was categorical: "Our favorite part of the grilling experience? The Ninja was entirely smokeless throughout." Real Homes cooked asparagus and sausages and reported not just an absence of smoke but an absence of smell — "During grilling there was very little smoke and I was struck by the lack of sausage smell in the kitchen. I personally hate the fatty smell of sausages cooking, so this was a welcome benefit of grilling them in the Ninja." Even Serious Eats, who disliked the grilling, did not accuse it of smoking.
That is a genuinely different mechanism from the rest of this page. Serious Eats' finding across her eight-grill test was that smoke reduction came from perforated grates letting fat leave the heating element quickly. The AG301 works differently: the fat drips into a cooking pot well below the grate, and the enclosed dome plus a splatter shield in the lid keeps what does volatilise from escaping into the room. Being fully enclosed is the reason it beats open grills on odour containment, and it is also the reason it cannot mark food the way an open grill does. The two facts are the same design decision seen from either side.
The Air Fryer Is the Better Half
Two of the three reviewers ended up recommending this machine partly on the strength of a function that is not grilling. Serious Eats was blunt — "This machine was great—as an air fryer." Real Homes tested it on toasted cheese sandwiches, which crisped enough to flip after four minutes, and on cauliflower florets at 400°F, and her buying advice is conditional on using both halves: "I really enjoyed using the grill and air crisp functions and achieved great results with both, so I'd say if you're going to use both of these functions it's definitely worth it."
The other three functions are weaker and the reviews say so. Reviewed baked a cake in the 6-quart pot and got an honest result: "A yellow cake came out evenly browned with a moist tender crumb, but it was seriously domed and cracked on top." Real Homes lists "roast and bake functions require some trial and error" among her reasons to avoid, and Reviewed noted that the otherwise thorough manual is missing guidelines for baking and roasting entirely. Treat this as a two-function appliance that also does three other things.
Counter Space and a Shield to Wash
The most consistent practical complaint has nothing to do with cooking. All three reviewers list counter space as a real cost — it is on Real Homes' reasons-to-avoid list as "Takes up a lot of counter space," on The Spruce Eats' cons list in the same words, and among Reviewed's four cons as simply "It's large." Reviewed's advice is to plan around it: "You have to keep in mind that you'll need a large space in your kitchen or a nearby pantry to accommodate this Foodi."
Be careful with the numbers here, because they do not agree and Ninja does not settle them: the company publishes no assembled dimensions or weight for the AG301 at all. Retail listings and testers give figures several inches and about five pounds apart — The Spruce Eats' tester measured it at roughly 17 by 14 by 11 inches and "just under 15 pounds." Cleaning has one recurring chore: "In the top of the lid, there's a splatter shield that needs to be popped out after each use and cleaned," though as Reviewed adds, "all of the removable parts (including the shield) can go in the dishwasher."
Discontinued by Ninja, Still on Shelves
One piece of purchasing context matters before you buy. Ninja has retired the AG301 from its own store — there is no live first-party product page for it any more, only support documentation covering the AG300 series. It remained in stock and actively sold on Amazon when checked on 2 August 2026, and Ninja still hosts the owner's guide, but you are buying a model the manufacturer has moved on from. The successors are the Ninja Sizzle GR101, which is a dedicated grill, and the 6-in-1 versions of this same machine.
That reframes the decision. If you want the AG301 specifically for its air fryer and grill combination, it is buyable and three reviewers found it competent at both. If you mainly want indoor grilling, the case is weak: it costs more than double the Zojirushi EB-CC15 Indoor Electric Grill and the Hamilton Beach Searing Grill with Lid Window 25361, takes eight minutes to preheat where they take four to five, and the one tester who benchmarked it directly against dedicated smokeless grills preferred both of them to it.
Strengths
- +Three separate testers reported essentially no smoke — Reviewed called it "entirely smokeless throughout" its grilling tests
- +1760 watts driving a 10-by-10-inch ceramic-coated grate, with LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH and MAX settings running 400°F, 450°F, 500°F and up to 510°F
- +The air fryer is genuinely good and preheats in about three minutes, against roughly eight for the grill
- +Reviewed's chicken and burgers "looked like they could have been done on an outdoor grill," and salmon skin came out crisp without flipping
- +Ships with a 6-quart cooking pot, a 4-quart crisper basket, a splatter shield, kebab skewers and a cleaning brush, all ceramic-coated and dishwasher safe
- +Real Homes noted the absence of cooking smells as well as smoke, which is a separate and underrated benefit
Watch-outs
- −Serious Eats disagrees with the other testers outright, finding that on the grill setting "it just didn't provide good grill marks"
- −The grate leaves curved grill marks rather than straight lines, and because the lid does not press down it only marks one side at a time
- −Preheat is long — Reviewed measured about eight minutes, Real Homes seven to eight, The Spruce Eats five to eight depending on setting
- −It is large and heavy enough that every reviewer flagged counter space as a real cost
- −A splatter shield in the lid has to be popped out and washed after every single use
- −Ninja has retired it from its own store, so there is no first-party product page or current-model support listing
- −Ninja publishes no assembled dimensions or weight, and the figures quoted by retailers and testers disagree by several inches and five pounds
How it compares
The AG301 is the multi-function outlier here and the Ninja Sizzle Smokeless Indoor Grill & Griddle GR101 is Ninja's own answer to its biggest problems — no eight-minute preheat, a fraction of the bulk, and grill marks nobody disputes. Against the Zojirushi EB-CC15 Indoor Electric Grill and the Hamilton Beach Searing Grill with Lid Window 25361 it costs two to three times as much and cooks by circulating air rather than by direct contact heat. The Breville BGR820XL The Smart Grill is the alternative if you want one appliance doing several jobs but want real contact grilling.
Rating sources
“The Ninja Foodi AG301 5-in-1 Indoor Grill is an indoor multi-functional grill that's also a great air fryer, but it's expensive and bulky.”
“Our favorite part of the grilling experience? The Ninja was entirely smokeless throughout.”
“A top-down heat source produces temperatures up to 500 degrees, and a powerful fan circulates the hot air to cook food quickly and evenly with grill-like results; Ninja calls this combination its Cyclonic Grilling Technology.”
“This machine was great-as an air fryer. While it claims to be an all-in-one model, I felt that the way it cooked on the "grill" setting was more like an air fryer than a grill, and it just didn't provide good grill marks.”
Our 4.1 score is the average of the 3 scored reviews above; 1 more reviewed it without printing a score and is not in the average. Ratings marked * were derived from the reviewer’s written analysis or video transcript — the publisher didn’t print an explicit numeric score, so we inferred one from their own words. Click through to verify. More about methodology.
