Breville Bambino Plus vs De'Longhi Dedica Duo

The honest short answer

These are the two smallest real espresso machines we cover, and they are compact in completely different ways.

The Bambino Plus is small because Breville shrank a proper espresso machine. It kept PID temperature control, kept low-pressure pre-infusion, kept the 54 mm portafilter Breville uses across its whole range, and then added the one feature nothing else at this size has: milk textured hands-free to a temperature and foam level you choose. It is at extraction temperature in three seconds. It is 7.5 inches wide.

The Dedica Duo is small because De'Longhi made it 15 centimetres wide— 5.8 inches, narrower than a sheet of A4 paper stood on its side — and designed everything else around that constraint. There is no PID. The steam wand is manual. De'Longhi publishes no portafilter diameter for it at all. What it does have, and nothing else on this site does, is one-touch cold brew.

So: the Bambino Plus is the better espresso machine, and it is not particularly close. The Dedica Duo wins on exactly two things — physical width, and cold brew — and if either of those is a hard requirement for you, it wins outright, because the Bambino cannot do either.

Specs, head to head

Look at what that table has to say "not published" about on the De'Longhi side. That is not us being lazy — it is us refusing to fill De'Longhi's gaps with numbers we found on a retailer's page. Two of those gaps are genuinely consequential, and we deal with both below.

What actually separates them

Automatic milk vs a wand you steer

Breville's specification for the Bambino Plus reads automatic, hands-free milk texturing: three milk temperatures, three foam levels, an auto-purge afterwards. Wand in the jug, press, walk away.

De'Longhi's specification for the Dedica Duo reads a manual "My LatteArt" cool-touch steam wand. You steer it and you judge the milk yourself, and that is a skill that takes weeks of practice and a lot of wasted milk to acquire.

If milk drinks are why you are buying an espresso machine — and for most people they are — this single row decides the page. The Bambino Plus will hand you a properly textured flat white on your first morning. The Dedica will hand you a jug of bubbles for a while first. The counter-argument is real but narrow: if you wantto learn to pour latte art, an automatic wand cannot teach you and a manual one can, and De'Longhi named theirs after exactly that ambition.

PID, and the temperature you cannot see

The Bambino Plus has PID temperature control. The Dedica Duo does not — it is a Thermoblock with no PID, which means nothing is actively holding the brew water at a set point across the shot. Both machines advertise a 15 bar pump, and that number is marketing on both: espresso is a 9 bar drink and the pump rating tells you nothing about the cup.

Temperature, on the other hand, tells you a lot. It is the difference between a shot that tastes the same on Tuesday as it did on Monday and one that doesn't, and it is the most common invisible reason a beginner's espresso is inconsistent. Breville also runs low-pressure pre-infusion before the pressure ramps, which forgives a slightly uneven tamp. De'Longhi does not publish whether the Dedica does anything comparable, so we make no claim either way — but we can tell you which of the two machines states, on the record, that it controls the thing that matters. Our do you actually need a PID? piece is the longer argument.

The portafilter De'Longhi will not name

This is the finding that should genuinely change your decision, and you will not read it anywhere else.

De'Longhi publishes no portafilter diameter for the Dedica Duo. Anywhere. Not on the US product page, not on the EU one, and not in the official manual — whose technical data table lists voltage, power, tank size, dimensions and weight, and still omits the portafilter. Breville, by contrast, publishes 54 mm plainly, and puts it in the manual.

Why this matters in practice: the accessories that actually improve espresso are all sized to the portafilter. A calibrated tamper. A precision basket. A bottomless portafilter. A puck screen. A distribution tool. Every one of those requires you to know a number the manufacturer has decided not to give you. You will find "51 mm" quoted confidently online — that figure comes from third-party sellers of aftermarket parts, not from De'Longhi, and it is specifically unverified for this redesigned model. We are not going to repeat it, because if it is wrong you have bought a tamper that does not fit.

With the Bambino Plus, you look up "54 mm" and you buy the thing. That is a small difference in documentation and a large difference in what you can do with the machine two years from now. If you want to see what those accessories actually are, we cover the ones that change the shot on our tampers page.

Cold brew: the Dedica's trump card

Now the other side of the ledger, because the Dedica Duo has one feature that is genuinely differentiating and it deserves better than a footnote.

The Dedica Duo has three presets: espresso, double espresso, and cold brew. De'Longhi calls it Cold Extraction Technology and says it produces cold brew in under five minutes, at the touch of a button. Not iced espresso — actual cold-extracted coffee, without the overnight steep.

No other machine on this site does this. Not the Bambino Plus, not the Barista Express, not the Gaggia. If half your year is iced-coffee weather, or if the person you are buying for drinks cold coffee by default, that is not a gimmick — it is a reason to buy this machine over a technically better espresso machine, and we would rather say so than pretend the feature list only counts when it favours our preferred pick.

Be clear-eyed about what it is worth, though. It is a convenience feature, not a quality feature. Cold brew is not hard to make without a machine; it is just slow. What you are buying is the five minutes instead of the twelve hours. Whether that is worth choosing a no-PID, undocumented-portafilter machine over a PID machine with hands-free milk is a judgement only you can make — but it is a real trade, not a fake one.

What each is like to live with

The Bambino Plus is a small machine that behaves like a big one. Three seconds to temperature, a 1.9 L tank, a 54 mm portafilter with single-wall and dual-wall baskets and the Razor dosing tool in the box, and a milk system that removes the single hardest skill in home espresso. Two years of warranty, stated plainly by Breville. It weighs just under 11 pounds.

The Dedica Duo is a machine designed around a gap in a kitchen. At 5.8 inches wide and 9.2 pounds, it will fit places nothing else will — and if your counter run is the binding constraint, that is not a nice-to-have, it is the whole purchase. It has a soft-touch digital display, a 16 g basket, a cool-touch wand, and a tamper and cleaning needle in the box.

The slimness has a cost, and it is on the spec table: a 1.1 L water tank against the Bambino's 1.9 L. You will be refilling it noticeably more often, and on a machine this narrow the tank is not a trivial thing to top up. That is the honest price of 15 centimetres.

The grinder question

Neither machine has a grinder. Neither can make espresso without one. So on paper the grinder cost is the same on both sides — but in practice, it isn't quite, and the reason is the missing portafilter spec.

With the Bambino Plus, you know you are grinding into a 54 mm portafilter, and you can pick a grinder accordingly. Breville's own Smart Grinder Pro ships with a 50-54 mm cradle and grinds straight into it. Baratza's Encore ESP ships with a 54 mm dosing cup. It is a solved problem with a documented answer.

With the Dedica Duo, you are grinding into a portafilter whose diameter the manufacturer declines to publish — so any grinding-directly-into-the-basket workflow involves a measurement you have to make yourself, and any dosing cup you buy is a guess. You can of course grind into a cup and transfer, which is what most people do anyway. But it is one more small friction on a machine that already has several.

If you go with the Bambino, we wrote the pairing guide: the best grinder for the Breville Bambino. If you go with the Dedica, start at the best grinders for espresso and pick on grind quality rather than on portafilter fit, because portafilter fit is a question this machine will not answer for you. And if the budget only stretches to one good thing, read machine or grinder first before you spend.

Which one for which buyer

The verdict

As an espresso machine, the Bambino Plus wins, clearly and on the record. It has PID and the Dedica does not. It has pre-infusion and the Dedica does not publish one. It textures milk hands-free and the Dedica makes that your job. It has a documented portafilter size and the Dedica has none. It has nearly double the water tank, and a warranty you can actually read. If you are buying an espresso machine to make espresso, buy the Bambino Plus and put every spare pound into the grinder.

The Dedica Duo is not a consolation prize, though, and we are not going to damn it with faint praise. It wins on two things the Bambino cannot answer at any price: it is 15 centimetres wide, and it makes cold brew at the touch of a button in under five minutes. Those are narrow advantages. They are also absolute ones. If your counter is the constraint, or if cold coffee is what you actually drink, the better espresso machine is the one that fits in your kitchen and makes the drink you want — and that is this one. It is also the cheaper box, which leaves more of a fixed budget for the grinder, and the grinder does more for your coffee than either of these machines does.

What we would not do is buy the Dedica because it looks like the smarter deal and then hope to grow into it. The missing PID, the missing pre-infusion spec, the unpublished portafilter and the unreadable warranty all point the same way: this is a machine designed to be lovely and slim, not to be dialled in and upgraded. The machine you grow into is the Bambino Plus — or, if you have already decided you want the craft, something with a 58 mm commercial portafilter instead.

Read each machine in full: the Bambino Plus review and the De'Longhi Dedica review. The rest of our head-to-heads live on the comparison hub.