Ninja's $350 Swirl Machine Delivers Soft-Serve Quality at Home—With Caveats

The Ninja Swirl by Creami arrived at CNET's Manhattan office less than a month after hitting the market, and the team decided the best way to test a soft-serve machine was to throw an ice cream party. On a Tuesday in early March, social media manager Tara Brown prepared a batch of vanilla soft serve in one of the included pints and left it to freeze overnight. The next day, producer Lai Frances and reviewer Corin Cesaric unpacked the machine, read the instructions, and got to work.

The setup took less than a minute once they understood the sequence: place the frozen pint into an outer bowl with a handle, add the lid with the Creamerizer paddle, lock it down, slide the bowl under the machine's right side, and twist until it clicks. Then select your program and wait. The machine is loud—construction-site loud, one tester noted—but the spin cycle only lasts four to five minutes depending on what you're making. When it finished, they removed the pint, attached the dispense lid to the soft-serve side, and pulled the lever. The vanilla soft serve came out smooth and pudding-like, sweet enough to satisfy, and the office forgave the noise.

The Swirl improves on the original Ninja Creami, which launched in 2021, by adding six soft-serve settings and a dispensing nozzle. Where the original machine lets you eat directly from the pint, the Swirl lets you dispense into a cone or cup, making it feel like an actual ice cream vendor is operating in your kitchen. The six programs cover soft-serve ice cream, soft-serve lite ice cream, fruit whip, frozen yogurt, frozen custard, and CreamiFit for protein shakes. The machine comes with a booklet of more than thirty recipes and offers vegan and low-sugar substitutions. That extra functionality costs $170 more than the original Creami, which now sells for as low as $180.

Over the following week, the CNET team tested multiple batches. They made a one-ingredient frozen yogurt and a dairy-free vanilla coconut ice cream, both ready to spin in under five minutes of prep time. The catch is that you have to freeze your prepared mixture overnight in the pint—a full twenty-four-hour cycle from start to finish. But the pints take up far less freezer space than the bowl attachments required by traditional ice cream makers. If you're hosting an event, you can prep multiple pints in advance and have several batches ready to serve.

The coconut ice cream emerged as the office favorite. Nasha Addarich Martínez, CNET's managing editor and a taster of numerous vegan ice creams, said it compared to high-end store-bought versions but tasted fresher and less aggressively sweet. The frozen yogurt made with Greek yogurt came out tart and protein-rich. The vanilla soft serve was the sweetest of the three. Each spin took between four and five minutes, and when the pint ran empty, the machine automatically retracted it for easy removal. The pint and lid rinse clean and go straight into the dishwasher.

The math on cost matters here. A quality pint of ice cream from a grocery store runs nine dollars or more. The ingredients to make one at home cost roughly two to three dollars. At $350, the Swirl justifies itself if you plan to use it weekly. For someone who wants to make frozen treats occasionally and doesn't care much about texture or presentation, the original Creami at $180 does the job. But if you want variety—six different types of soft serve tailored to different diets and preferences—the Swirl offers something the cheaper model cannot. You get the texture and appearance of a professional soft-serve machine without leaving your office or home, and you pay less per serving than you would at any ice cream shop. The question is whether that matters enough to you to spend the money and dedicate the freezer space.