Instant Pot Duo Evo Plus 9-in-1 Review (2026)

Why you should trust this review

I bought this Duo Evo Plus with my own money to replace a base-model Duo that had lived on my counter for years. No brand sent it to me, and nobody from Instant Brands knew I was writing about it. That matters because the only way to know whether the lid and preheat changes are real or marketing is to live with the thing through everyday cooking, not a staged demo.

Over roughly two months I used it three or four times a week. Weeknight rice, weekend bone broth, dried beans I never soaked, a couple of pot roasts, and a long-shot attempt at sous vide steak. I already owned the older Duo, so I could put the two side by side on the same counter and run the same recipe in both. That direct comparison is the spine of everything below. I am not going to pretend a single-temperature water bath turned this into a Joule, and I will tell you exactly where it falls short.

How we evaluated

My testing was deliberately boring and repeatable. I timed the preheat-to-pressure phase from a cold start with the same two cups of water in both the Evo Plus and the original Duo, repeated three times each, and averaged the result. I cooked identical batches of long-grain white rice to check consistency, ran a four-hour bone broth to see how the seal held under a long cook, and pressure-cooked unsoaked pinto beans to test whether the unit reached and held a strong pressure.

For the sous vide claim I ran a three-hour bath at a fixed temperature with a separate probe thermometer sitting in the water so I could see how far the real temperature drifted from the set point. I cleaned the inner pot by hand and in the dishwasher across the test to judge how the stainless held up. None of this is a laboratory, and I am not claiming lab precision. It is the kind of research a careful home cook can actually reproduce.

The lid and the preheat are the real upgrades

The headline change is the lid. On the older Duo you have to line up an arrow, drop the lid, and rotate it until it clicks, and if you are off by a hair it fights you. The Evo Plus lid drops on and seals with one smooth twist. After two months I stopped thinking about it entirely, which is the highest compliment you can give a mechanism like this. The steam release is now a button on the lid rather than a little plastic switch you nudge with a spoon, and that small change makes quick-release feel less like a dare.

The preheat speed is the other genuine improvement. In my repeated timing runs the Evo Plus reached working pressure noticeably faster than the original Duo with the same volume of water, somewhere around a fifth quicker on average. On a weeknight that is the difference between dinner at 7:00 and dinner at 7:10, and over a week of cooking it adds up. It is not a transformative leap, but it is real and I felt it every time I used both units back to back.

Cooking results across rice, beans, and broth

Where the Evo Plus matters most is the food, and here it simply does the job. Long-grain rice came out evenly cooked with no scorched bottom layer across repeated batches. Unsoaked pinto beans went from hard to creamy in a single cycle, which is the test that separates a cooker that truly holds pressure from one that limps along. The four-hour bone broth never lost its seal, never spat liquid out the valve, and pulled a deep flavor out of the bones that I could not get on the stovetop without babysitting it.

The inner pot deserves a mention. It now has interior measurement markings and a wider, easier grip, so lifting a full pot of hot broth out of the housing feels secure rather than precarious. After dozens of dishwasher cycles the stainless still looks new, with no pitting or warping. This is the part of the appliance you touch most, and the redesign made daily use meaningfully nicer.

Sous vide and the modes that matter less

The Evo Plus advertises nine modes including sous vide and steam. The steam setting is genuinely useful for vegetables and dumplings. The sous vide mode is the one to set expectations on. In my three-hour bath the water held within a few degrees of the set point, which is fine for a forgiving cut but not the dead-steady hold a dedicated immersion circulator gives you. There is no water circulation, so the temperature near the edges drifted more than the center. I got a perfectly good steak out of it, but if precise sous vide is your reason to buy, a separate circulator is still the better tool. Treat sous vide here as a welcome bonus, not the main event.

The remaining modes, sauté, slow cook, yogurt, sterilize, are competent and cover the cases most people actually use. I would not buy this appliance for any single one of those modes alone, but having them in one housing genuinely does reduce clutter, and the dial interface makes hopping between them far less confusing than hunting across the legacy button grid on the older model.

Who should buy the Instant Pot Duo Evo Plus?

Buy it if: you do not already own an electric pressure cooker and want the cleanest, most refined version of the format. Buy it if the fiddly lid on older Duos has frustrated you, if you cook for two to four people, and if you want a stainless inner pot that will outlast a non-stick coating by years. The faster preheat and one-twist lid are small joys you will appreciate every single week.

Skip it if: you already own a recent Duo and it works fine, because the capacity is identical and the upgrades, while real, are refinements rather than reasons to replace a working appliance. Skip it if you need true large-batch capacity for a big family, in which case an 8-quart model is the smarter buy. And skip it if precise sous vide is your priority, since a dedicated circulator will beat the onboard mode handily.

The verdict

The Instant Pot Duo Evo Plus 9-in-1 is the multi-cooker I now point first-time buyers toward. It got the small things right, the lid that seals in one motion, the faster ramp to pressure, the readable dial, the better inner pot, and those small things are exactly what you bump into every day. The food results are reliable across rice, beans, and long broths, and the build quality holds up to repeated dishwasher cycles without complaint. Its weak spots are honest ones: no capacity bump over the original Duo and a sous vide mode that cannot match a real circulator. If you already own a good Instant Pot, keep it. If you are buying your first, this is the one I would put on your counter.