Cuisinart vs Breville Food Processor

This is the clearest either/or in the full-size food processor market, because the two machines are honest about being different things. The Cuisinart 14-Cup Food Processor (DFP-14BCNY) is a 14-cup bowl, a 720-watt motor and three parts to wash. The Breville Sous Chef 16 Pro (BFP810)is 16 cups, 1,200 watts and a slicing dial covering 0.3–8.0 mm. The question is not which is better built; it is whether you will use what the Breville adds.

The specs, side by side

What 1,200 watts actually changes

Two jobs, and only two: stiff dough and nut butter. Both are sustained loads where the motor works continuously against real resistance for minutes rather than seconds, and both are where a 720-watt machine is audibly working while a 1,200-watt one is not.

For everything else — chopping onions, slicing cucumber, shredding cheese, pureeing a soup, making pastry — the extra watts change nothing you can see. The Cuisinart’s 720 W is comfortably enough, which is exactly why it has been the default full-size processor for so long. Our dough and nut butterroundups are the two pages where the Breville’s advantage is real.

What the slicing dial changes

More than the wattage does, for most people. A fixed disc gives you one thickness; Breville publishes a dial spanning 0.3–8.0 mm that you turn without swapping discs. If you slice often — gratins, crisps, roasting trays, salads — that is a genuine daily difference, and it removes a drawer of discs.

If you slice occasionally and always at roughly the same thickness, it is a feature you will set once. Our slicing roundup goes into what decides that job, and the honest summary is that the dial matters to a minority of buyers and matters a lot to them.

The case for the Cuisinart

It costs substantially less, it does every everyday job as well, it has the shortest parts list in the category, and it has been in production long enough that parts, bowls and lids are genuinely available — which matters more than buyers expect, because a cracked bowl is how most processors die. Its own honest limitation is the flip side of the big bowl: dicing a single shallot in 14 cups is wasteful and messy, and a mini processor or a chopper is the better tool for small jobs.

The case for the Breville

You cook a lot, and the machine is out on the counter rather than in a cupboard. You make bread or pizza dough regularly, or nut butter. You slice at varied thicknesses often enough to want a dial. And you would rather have the extra two cups than the smaller footprint. If two or more of those are true, the Breville is not extravagant, it is the right tool. If none are, you are paying for headroom you will never reach.

What neither one solves

Both are full-size machines, and both are bad at small jobs. Half an onion in a 14- or 16-cup bowl is a chore to wash for a result a cheap chopper would have given you in seconds. Neither brand fixes that with a nested mini bowl, so if a lot of your prep is small, plan on a second, cheaper tool rather than expecting either machine to scale down — the chopper hub is where that decision lives.

Both also take real counter or cupboard space, and the Breville takes more of it. A processor that lives in a low cupboard gets used far less than one that lives out, which is a genuine argument for buying the machine that fits your kitchen rather than the machine with the better spec sheet. Our size guidetreats footprint as a real spec for exactly that reason.

The decision rule

Buy the Cuisinart unless you make dough or nut butter regularly, or slice at varied thicknesses regularly. Those are the only three things the Breville does that the Cuisinart does not do well.

Buy the Breville if any of those three is a weekly part of how you cook. The money is not buying a better onion; it is buying headroom and control on the specific jobs that punish a smaller motor and a fixed disc.

If you are choosing between brands more broadly, we have the same comparison for Cuisinart against KitchenAid and Ninja against Cuisinart, and the cost guide sets out what each price band buys.