Cheaper machines than the Sage Bambino Plus

Below the Sage Bambino Plus, milk stops being automatic, and no saving brings it back.

That fact carries a number. Every machine we rate below it scores 2 or 1 for steam and milk, where the Bambino Plus takes a 5, so the four worth buying divide on a different question: whether you want a portafilter in your hand or a different drink altogether.

Two things complicate the picture. One of the four will still be pouring coffee when the Bambino Plus has gone to the tip, and buyers who ask this question in public get answered with dearer machines, not cheaper ones.

What is a cheaper alternative to the Sage Bambino Plus?

Four, and each is the right buy for somebody. The De'Longhi Dedica Style EC685 is the only one our model measures against the Bambino Plus, at 55 per cent, and it keeps the portafilter, the metal handle you pack with coffee and twist into the machine. Below it the catalogue stops selling espresso machines at all: a moka pot and a capsule machine, bought for reasons the Bambino Plus was never the answer to.

Read them as four different bargains:

• Same drinks, narrower worktop, colder milk: the Dedica Style EC685.
• The budget is fixed and the portafilter matters: the Stilosa EC230.
• You want the thing to still work in 2040: the Moka Express.
• What you liked was the three seconds: the Vertuo Pop.

The rung below the Bambino Plus is a longer drop than the rung above it is a climb, and a price list gives no sign of that. On our similarity model the Bambino Plus scores 70 against the Barista Express above it, while the Dedica scores 55 against the Bambino Plus. Weighing both directions at once? The routes down from the Barista Express work through the other half of the same ladder.

The one you wantedSage Bambino Plus

• SageBarista Express BES875Full review →
  How close70%

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• De'LonghiDedica Style EC685

  What you give up: A panarello frother instead of automatic texturing, 51 mm baskets instead of 54 mm, and a pressurised basket in the box with no plain one alongside it.

  How close55%

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A cheaper machine gets you most of the result, not all of it — usually the last of the temperature stability or the milk. Price is confirmed at the store.

Will a cheaper machine still make a flat white?

No: three of our 14 machines texture milk without your hands on the jug, and the Bambino Plus is the only one of them that takes a portafilter. The other two are sealed bean-to-cup machines, one in its own tier and one a tier above, so neither is a way of spending less. Under it, nothing does this at all.

What you get instead is a panarello sleeve or a bare wand. The sleeve is a plastic collar that pulls air in on its own, and it makes foam that sits on the surface of the drink like the head on a pint. Microfoam, the dense wet milk that pours as one smooth layer, has to be spun into the jug rather than blown into it, and a sleeve cannot do that at any price.

Pour a sleeve's milk into an espresso and the foam stays behind in the jug until you spoon it out. That is a cappuccino, and a decent one. It is not a flat white, and the machine will not be talked round.

The figures Sage publishes show where the money goes: three milk temperatures, three texture settings, a wand that lowers into the jug and stops on its own. That is what the 5 buys.

A manual wand can beat this, for what it is worth. The prosumer machines we track reach 4 and 5 on the same scale with nothing automatic in them, and they expect months of practice in exchange.

The De'Longhi Dedica Style EC685 gets closest, at 55 per cent

It keeps the shape of the thing. A portafilter you fill and lock in, a tamper, a shot you assemble yourself, in a body scoring 7.0 against the Bambino Plus at 8.4. The 45 per cent our model cannot match up is milk, baskets and metal, in that order of how much you will notice.

Buy the Dedica Style EC685 if the worktop is narrow and a cappuccino is as far as the milk needs to go.

Measure the gap on your worktop before anything else. De'Longhi puts the Dedica at 15 cm across, the slimmest machine the company makes, against the 19.4 cm Sage lists for the Bambino Plus. In a galley kitchen those four centimetres decide the purchase, and the two-tier drip tray De'Longhi describes clears a 12 cm mug.

Then the compromises arrive together. The baskets are 51 mm rather than 54, which quietly changes what you can buy for it later, since the tampers, funnels and puck screens on the shelves are mostly cut for the bigger sizes. It ships pressurised, with no plain basket alongside, so the machine flatters whatever you put in it and caps the result. The wand is the Adjustable Cappuccino System, which is a panarello by another name.

Build rates 3 against 4, a year-five difference and not a day-one one.

The full spec sits on the Dedica's own card, drinks and features included.

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The De'Longhi Stilosa EC230 is the cheapest portafilter here

It scores 6.8 and it is the cheapest machine in the catalogue that hands you a tamper. Our model puts it at 70 per cent of the Dedica above it, which is another way of saying these two are near twins where the coffee happens and separate everywhere else.

Buy the Stilosa if the budget is genuinely fixed and you still want to learn on a real machine.

What the step down costs, in the catalogue's own words: a plastic body, no programmable shot volumes, and a wand that takes half again as long to texture the same jug. Build drops to 2, the joint lowest of anything we track. This is a machine to leave where you put it, and one that will not enjoy a hard water postcode.

Value tells the other story. It rates 5 there, level with the Moka Express and above the Bambino Plus at 4, because almost nothing else at that outlay lets you weigh a dose and tamp it. The flaw to plan for is the wand: it works, slowly, and on a school-run morning it is the part you will resent first.

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The Bialetti Moka Express outlives everything on this list

Build and durability rate 5 on the Moka Express, one of only five machines in our catalogue at the top mark and the only one of those that costs less than the Bambino Plus, which rates 4. There is no pump in it, no heating block and no circuit board, so there is nothing in it that fails in the way modern machines fail. The design has been on sale since 1933.

Buy the Moka Express if what you actually want is strong black coffee and a low bill.

Be clear about the drink, because a lot of listings are not. A moka pot brews at a fraction of the pressure an espresso machine reaches, so what comes out is intense and syrupy without being espresso, and our record earns it only the drinks it genuinely makes. Milk rates 1: there is no wand, no steam and no arrangement in which one appears.

It also runs at 95 on our quiet score, the highest figure in the catalogue, and the gaskets that wear out are still sold as spares. In a flat with a sleeping household that is not a minor virtue.

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The Nespresso Vertuo Pop, if it was the three seconds you liked

Speed rates 90 on our model here, exactly level with the Bambino Plus, and those two are the only machines in the catalogue at that mark. Ease of use rates 5 against the Bambino's 4. If the appeal of the Sage was that coffee arrived before you had woken up properly, this is the honest cheap version of that feeling.

Buy the Vertuo Pop if convenience was the whole argument and you never wanted to weigh anything.

The bill moves; it does not disappear. You buy the machine cheaply and then buy capsules for as long as you own it: a household on two drinks a day gets through about 730 a year. Value rates 3 and build rates 2, and the coffee is whatever the range offers this season.

Milk rates 1, since there is no wand on this model at all. The Vertuo Pop answers the speed half of the Bambino Plus and none of the milk half.

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What buyers actually choose instead

Ask this in public and the answers come back dearer. In a thread on r/JamesHoffmann from October 2025, someone asked for alternatives to the Bambino Plus with a firm ceiling on the budget, and across 24 comments not one reply named a cheaper machine. Back came the Gaggia Classic Evo Pro under its other model code, the Lelit Anna, and a second-hand ECM bought with a grinder as a package.

Both of those machines are in our catalogue. The Gaggia scores 8.5 and the Lelit 8.2, and both sit at 2 on ease of use, half the mark the Bambino Plus takes. They swap a hands-free wand for a chassis you can open, a good trade for a certain kind of Sunday and a poor one on a Tuesday. Whether that trade is worth making is a question we have already put numbers to.

The thread also caught the catch on the Lelit unaided: its portafilter is 57 mm, and our record flags that as the reason almost nothing on an accessory shelf will fit it. One commenter had found a single brand making the whole set in that size. That was enough to settle it for them.

What the cheaper machines give up

Three losses, in the order they bite. The wand goes first and you feel it every morning. The pressurised basket arrives second, since a machine that flatters bad coffee also puts a ceiling on good coffee, and no grinder you buy later will lift it. The 54 mm fitting goes third, months on, when you go looking for a funnel that fits.

The warm-up survives in one place only, and it is the capsule machine. The Dedica and the Stilosa both want a minute or two of thinking ahead before the first cup, and the moka pot wants a hob and your attention while it sits on it.

None of that makes the Bambino Plus the strongest machine here on every axis. It gives up build to the Moka Express, ease of use to the pod, and value to both. What it owns is the axis most people are shopping for, which is a milk drink that tastes like the one in the shop.

The hidden cost of a cheap machine in a hard water area

One machine of the five here ships a water filter, and it is the Bambino Plus. The Dedica and the Stilosa both carry a descaling programme and nothing to slow the scale down in the first place, which in Kent or Cambridgeshire is a different proposition from the same machine in Glasgow.

Limescale kills more home espresso machines than wear ever does. It plates the inside of the heater, the heater then works harder to push water through the deposit, and one morning the first cup takes twice as long and the machine gives up a week later. From the outside that failure looks like bad luck.

So a cheaper machine in the chalk counties arrives with a filter jug attached to the purchase, or a bottled water habit, plus a descaling schedule somebody keeps to. Neither is expensive. Both are the sort of thing people mean to start doing in month two.

The Moka Express dodges all of it, which is part of why it rates 5 for build. There is no boiler to fur up, and any scale that forms sits on a surface you can reach with a cloth.

FAQ: buying below the Bambino Plus

What is the cheapest machine that still makes real espresso?

The Stilosa EC230, which scores 6.8 and gives you a 51 mm portafilter, a tamper and a manual wand. Everything cheaper in our catalogue either uses a capsule or has no pump, so it makes a different drink.

Is the plain Sage Bambino a cheaper way in?

Yes, and it is the closest thing to a loophole here. Everything that makes the espresso is shared between the two models, and what the Plus adds is the automatic wand and a larger tank, so the cheaper one asks you to learn to steam milk by hand. We do not track the plain model, but our review of the Plus works through the step between them, with the figures from Sage's manual.

Is Sage the same as Breville?

Same machines, different name by market. Sage is the brand used in the United Kingdom and Breville the one used in the United States and Australia, which is why a search for a Bambino Plus review turns up American coverage of a machine with a different badge. The catch is that the ranges do not match model for model, so a machine praised in an American review is sometimes not sold here at all.

Is a second-hand machine the better cheap route?

Sometimes, and it carries a risk you cannot see. A used prosumer machine with a grinder can land near the price of a new mid-range one, which is what one commenter in that thread did. What you cannot inspect is scale: a machine run on hard water and never descaled is furred inside long before it fails, and there is no guarantee to fall back on. Buy from someone who can tell you what water it drank.

Do these cheaper machines need a separate grinder too?

The two with portafilters do, exactly as the Bambino Plus does, and the pressurised baskets they ship soften that blow without removing it. Pre-ground coffee will produce a drinkable shot through a pressurised basket and a poor one through anything else. Our ratio calculator will sort the dose and yield once you have chosen.

Which of these is quietest?

The Moka Express, at 95 on our quiet score, because there is nothing inside it to make a noise. The other three carry no quiet rating with us at all: none of the three makers publishes a figure we could check, and we would rather leave the field empty than fill it with a guess.

What is a good upgrade from the Bambino Plus?

The Barista Express, at 70 per cent similarity and 8.6, if the missing grinder is the itch. If it is the milk wand you have outgrown, the answer is a prosumer machine and a real apprenticeship, which is a different budget and a different hobby.