The Best Dish Racks of 2021

Before unboxing this bad boy, we never knew dish racks could have so many bells and whistles. Its countertop footprint isn’t as big as you’d expect for something that can hold as many dishes as the PremiumRacks—but that’s only because it happens to be a smartly designed double-decker.

The bottom portion is your standard featureless rack, fine for balancing bowls or perhaps a colander, but the top portion holds plates more securely than most racks. A cutlery basket hooks onto the side, as does a second basket that can be topped with a lid specifically designed for sharp knives. The cup holder clips don’t work as well as they should, but you have plenty of space to dry your cups on the rack itself—especially if you dry your cutting boards in the special cutting board attachment.

The rack also comes with two drain board options—one meant to let water pool, and the other designed to tip any water into the sink—plus a microfiber cloth to set underneath.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the features, don’t be. The most stressful part of the rack is simply assembling it, which could take 10 minutes and a good look at some Ikea-style visual instructions, but once it’s assembled, everything is fairly straightforward. All of the extras are optional, including the top rack, but if your cabinets are high enough to accommodate a double-decker rack, then we highly recommend this rack. It’s sturdy, shiny, and uses space pretty efficiently—what could be so bad?

Putting things together can be just as much of a pain as washing dishes, so when we discovered this product is already ready to go out of the box— all you need to do is push the bottom to expand as deeply or as shallowly as you need—we fell in love.

It has a drainboard if you want to keep it on the counter, but for those of us with limited space and double sinks who prefer the dish rack to nest in one side, this is the ticket.

Prepworks is plastic and has holes in the bottom to drain water so sitting over the sink means never having to deal with puddles on the counter, though the drip tray has a lip that allows the water to run off into the sink. Those holes also mean your dishes aren’t sitting in water and can dry pretty efficiently.

The rack has lots of grooves so plates and bowls can stack and stand easily, and one side has a slotted section for utensils. If you choose to expand the rack as deeply as possible, the slots become too large and you may have to work harder to get your silverware to stand up so that they can dry.

This large but lightweight rack is just two pieces so it’s best for those of us who want to keep it simple. Because it’s collapsible you can slide it underneath the counter and out of the way if you want to use the sink or just keep it out in view.

The Joseph Joseph’s Extend Rack offers a quieter kind of presence that we're totally in love with. It's a great rack for a small space. At a glance, it’s just a small plastic rack with metal prongs and a utensil holder—fine, but nothing special. But take a closer look, because this rack is seriously great.

The prongs offer a lot of flexibility for holding everything from standard dishes to oddly-shaped objects, and they seem to hold a lot of items without too much wobbling.

The only limit here is its small size, which can easily meet the needs of one or two people with a cramped kitchen. But if you’re hosting a dinner party and want more space, the Extend Rack—surprise!—extends to almost twice its size. The process is smooth and easy to do even when you have dishes on the rack, and it gives you a lot more space to work with.

We won’t pretend the grooved plastic of the extension is the most successful drying surface ever, but if you’re someone who wants a small rack for every day with the option of something larger when the need strikes, the feature is a godsend.

Also awesome is the drain spout, which can be opened to tip excess water into the sink or plugged if you’d rather deal with any puddles later. It’s worth noting that during testing, we never actually witnessed water moving through the spout—it seems that a smaller amount of water will pool in the base, but larger amounts should be able to drain out.

This is a good product for a small kitchen, because it doesn’t take up a lot of counter real estate and folds up so it can be put away when not in use. Assembly is simple because it’s self-contained.

There are pegs for glasses and two containers for utensils and you can fold things up and down to suit your needs. There are plenty of drain holes and a spout you can open or close to drain the rack. As for draining, the rack's legs can be extended to make it tilt to facilitate water flow into the sink.

The OXO has a modern look and the dishes dried pretty efficiently, but it is small, so if you have a lot of dishes this may not work for you. Also if you want it to sit over the sink your sink will need to be pretty small. Someone who doesn’t have a large volume of dishes might be happy with this cute little one-stop-shop dish rack.

This dish rack fits in or over the sink, and there is no drip tray or drainboard. The arms extend so the size of the sink doesn’t matter. But extending it doesn’t create more space for dishes in the rack. It's very compact.

If you want something to dry a few dishes—and we stress a few—that you can then toss under the sink and out of sight, this is the one you want. Draining nor drying was an issue and it had enough slots to hold plates and cups securely.

A little assembly is needed to snap the utensil holders in place but there are no other accessories.

This is the rack for someone who occasionally needs to wash a plate and a glass, not a family.

The Simplehuman dish rack is full-size and stands out. Its legs lift it high off the counter, and smooth, shiny stainless steel encases its very large body. A clever wine glass holder with a fold-out tray for catching any drips extends high off the side, as do cup holders and a large cutlery basket. Beneath the rack, you’ll find a removable drip tray that can be pulled out to catch water from the cup holders and a spout to guide water into the sink.

Of all the racks we tested, this was the only one that successfully had most of its water drained through its swivel spout. It's also easy to clean, thanks to the anti-residue coating on its tray. This rack also felt the sturdiest, and while it doesn't have a lifetime warranty, the brand guarantees its products for 10 years, which isn't bad for something you'll probably use every singe day.

Despite this, however, we actually hated using this pricey tool. The structured part of the rack causes dishes to lean back in a way that’s both precarious and an inefficient use of space. The rack is extremely large, but much of its space is not structured at all, meaning you can’t fit as much as you’d think. Cups were unsteady on the cup holders.

The thing sits very tall over the counter, whether or not you add height with its optional feet, so it becomes a focal point of your kitchen.

This dish rack is nice to look at and if you wash a lot of pots and pans, this may be what you need, but we had difficulty standing up our plates, so drying took longer.

It was also too big to fit in the sink but came with a drip tray which tilts slightly so that water runs into the sink. It came ready to go out of the box.

The medium-sized Polder has plenty of space, but it uses it poorly. We couldn’t balance so much as a shot glass on its cup holders without the glass toppling down. When we placed dishes in the rack, they wobbled and fell on one another in a way that made it feel like breakage was inevitable. Like the Simplehuman, there's also a lot of unstructured space that seemed like it could be put to better use.

There’s a big divided utensil holder that hangs off the side, a drip tray that collected but did not drain water during testing, and a removable drying tray that doesn't seem particularly useful. You’ll want to pass on this one.

There comes a time in many people’s lives when they just want to spend less than $20 on a very small dish rack and suffer the consequences. That’s fine.

The Neat-O is exactly what it seems—lightweight, flimsy, and devoid of any extras unless you count a few dicey cup holders on the side. It doesn’t even come with a tray to catch water, so you’ll want to rest it on a dish towel or buy a drip tray of your own to go underneath.

The Neat-O doesn’t have much space to work with and offers very little structure. You just kind of pile your dishes in there and hope for the best.

Like the Neat-O, the Rubbermaid is a cheap, flimsy, unstructured dish rack. It does come with a drip tray, but in this case, the tray doesn’t feel like much of a boon.

The tray slants down, which causes water to spill from the side instead of pooling at the bottom. In theory, it’s a good idea, but in reality, it dumps as much water on the counter as it dumps in the sink, and the slant means that any glasses you place on its surface (which you have to do because there aren’t any glass clips) slide down to the bottom of the slope.

Included in the packaging are a sponge caddy and scrub brush, which are likely more useful than the rack itself.