I was excited when I heard about the first Nutribullet full-sized blender—but not that excited.

You see, I’m the proud owner of an original-sized Nutribullet. I could really wax poetic about all the beautiful things it’s done for me—so I will. It’s a highly capable home blender that’s wildly affordable and takes up very little space. And it is absolutely a crucial tool for cooking for one person: it makes it easy to whip up a perfect little portion of smoothie or sauce. You can tuck the appliance away in your cabinet, all in one piece. You can easily drink your smoothie out of the large cup container you blended it in—and even take that container to work with you. I have the gold one and I find it shockingly chic for a mini-blender that got its start on an infomercial. Which is to say, its small but mighty footprint makes it feel like it was designed for me, a single person living in a (cute but!) very small space.

And now, baby’s growing up. (Nutribullet, I mean. Me? I’m still living in a box.) But I remained skeptical about the idea of a big blender from the people who brought you the convenient, small blender, because one of the key components of my love for the Nutribullet is, of course, the very smallness they are discarding with this new model.

The Best Blender for Every Budget

We crushed ice and made smoothies packed with kale, dates, and almonds to find the best blenders on the market.

So I put it through its paces. I compared the Nutribullet full-sized blender with the winner of our blender product test, the Vitamix 5200, and my regular little Nutribullet Pro (I have the slightly more expensive version, which draws from 900 watts of power rather than the regular Nutribullet’s 600). I made this smoothie recipe, which we have used to test every blender we’ve reviewed, since its ingredient list—an orange, two cups of kale, a whole quarter cup of almonds, a mere quarter cup of almond milk, and dates—will quickly take down any inferior blending mechanism.

Nutribullet’s full-sized blender was able to blend the nuts, kale, almonds, and dates into a creamy, totally smooth smoothie. And this speaks to its power. An entire quarter cup of almonds and two cups of tough, leafy kale is too much for many blenders at similar price-points. However, blending the smoothie to the perfect level of creaminess took twice as long in the Nutribullet as it did in the Vitamix, and involved a lot of stopping and restarting the blender and scraping down the sides.

The full-size Nutribullet has a wide, round pitcher. Bits of kale and almond and date get flung up by the blades and stuck to the wide sides. In contrast, the Vitamix’s tall, narrow profile (combined with its insane sports-car horsepower) keeps all of the ingredients contained in the bottom of the machine with minimal splashing, allowing the full mix to get sucked into the vortex at the base and quickly annihilated by the whirring blades.

The Nutribullet did have one advantage over the Vitamix. It didn’t make my smoothie hot. The Vitamix quickly whirred the ingredients into a thick, gloopy green health concoction. But, the smoothie was warm from the high powered motor. (Using a frozen banana in the place of a room-temperature one might improve the situation. On the other hand, the Nutribullet that I started and stopped and stirred a bunch of times didn’t give me warm, sweet kale soup. Which I was hugely grateful for. (It should be noted that the Nutribullet also comes with an additional small, bullet-shaped blending pitcher that you can put on the regular blender base.)

Okay, though, back to my complaints! The Nutribullet’s tamper (that suspect-looking piece of rubber weaponry that blenders now almost always come with that you are supposed to use to push down ingredients) is too short to reach the bottom of the pitcher through the hole in the top of the lid. Instead, you’re required to stop the machine and take the entire lid off to keep ingredients trending toward the bottom of their pitcher. The Vitamix offers a far-superior long, narrow tamper for this task.