Best fridge freezer 2024: freestanding, American- and French-style options

The best fridge freezers on the market can make a huge difference to your kitchen setup. In this guide, T3 will point you towards the top models available now, offering cutting edge technology, excellent value for money, and extras that you didn't even know you needed.

Things you'll need to consider before buying a fridge freezer is the size space you have, how much money you've got to spend, the level of food storage space you need, and more. While the choice can be a little overwhelming, we're here to guide you towards the right product.

What these standalone fridge freezers give you are high-end functionality and plenty of character. Picking up one of the best fridge freezers can be a more economical option than picking up a separate fridge and freezer and combining them, so here are our top picks for the best fridge freezers you can buy today.

P.S. If you want something supersized, consider our guide to the best American-style fridge freezer if you've got a lot of room to spare.

Best fridge freezers ranking 2024

This frost-free, American-style fridge freezer is going to add a touch of class and elegance to any kitchen, with its stainless steel grey finish and its bulky size – just make sure it's going to fit through the door to your kitchen, and has room to fit in alongside your other appliances.

With four different doors, a built-in LED display, touch controls and an external water dispenser, this is sure to impress even the most tech-savvy users, and it's guaranteed to become a family favourite whether you're cooking up a storm for dinner or sneaking a midnight snack.

The multi air flow system means that the internal temperatures remain stable and even throughout, and you're never going to find any frost inside this device. The triple zone cooling and super freeze functions add even more appeal to this fantastic all-round package.

Granted, a shade under £1,800 is a lot of wodge to spend on a fridge freezer, but look what you get with this tasty French-door behemoth. Let’s start with capacity. The upper fridge department will happily swallow 405 litres of munchies while the freezer compartment below will devour up to 200 litres of frozen goodies.

Let’s break that down a bit more. The fridge compartment has two VitaFresh trays – on the left an extra large one for keeping fruit and vegetables in tip-top condition and on the right, a zero-degrees drawer for keeping meat and fish at optimum temperature. Directly above are three deep shelves (two adjustable) and in each door an array of shelves for milk, cheese, butter, what have you.

The no-frost freezer section is equally well endowed and equipped with two huge drawers capable of holding a wedding cake or anything else of serious magnitude while the four smaller drawers above and below on either side are perfect for storing ice creams, bags of ice, frozen peas, French fries and the remains of last night’s shepherds pie.

At 183cm in height and 91cm in width, you will need a lot of space in the kitchen or pantry to fit it in but you’re unlikely to regret having it to hand because, being of Bosch origin, you can bet it will be super efficient and, above all, exceedingly reliable. And with its good-for-its-size E energy rating, it shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg to run it either.

Hitting the sweet spot between price and functionality is the Zanussi ZNME36FW0, an integrated 70/30 frost-free fridge freezer: it gives you plenty of space, plenty of flexibility, and top-notch reliability at a price that's not going to empty out the entirety of your savings account (probably – depending on your frugality).

There's a total of 367 litres of capacity here across both fridge and freezer, so unless your family is regularly hosting dinner parties that the entire street is invited to, you're going to find it's got enough room to keep all of your groceries (and plenty of different sections to store them in).

You've got a total of five shelves in the fridge, three compartments in the freezer, and more capacity on the swinging door as well. The Holiday mode is a nice touch too – it'll save power by running the fridge on low power but keeping the freezer fully cold. Just don't forget to empty the fridge before you go…

Is this French door Goliath the be-all and end-all fridge freezers? It certainly looks that way. French door fridge freezers – usually described as having a two-door refrigerator space on top and a freezer drawer below – are known to provide acres of meal estate but this model goes a step further by including a windowed twin-shelf wine cooler that divides the fridge and freezer sections. If money is no obstacle – and let’s face it, a shade under £4,000 is a huge obstacle for most of us – we can think of no better combo than this startling black beauty.

Siemens has really pushed the boat out with this model. Aside from its massive 401 litres of fridge space and enormous a 171-litre freezer compartment, the iQ700 also features an ice maker that produces up to 20 cubes at a time, special interior LED lighting that illuminates everything in the fridge, a frost-free freezer compartment and, for tech nerds, Home Connect, which lets you control the fridge from afar and even keep tabs on the sell-by dates of its contents, if that is your wont.

The iQ700’s interior shelving system is one of the most elegant we’ve seen and it provides loads of space for a horde of goodies, despite having only one admittedly large crisper drawer. Meanwhile down below in the freezer section there’s enough capacity to satisfy even the most pessimistic of preppers.

Despite the price, this is one of Siemens’ most popular combos, presumably because of the extra wine refrigeration unit. But, at 183 x 90.6cm, you will need a substantial amount of space to accommodate it.

There aren't many fridge freezers stylish enough to turn heads when placed in a kitchen, but we think that the Samsung RS8000 RS68A8820SL can pull it off – it's a stunner of an American-style fridge freezer, and it's big enough to hold some 33 bags of food shopping (according to Samsung's definition of a bag).

You've got 402 litres of space and four shelves in the fridge, and 207 litres of space and four compartments in the freezer section, so you're going to have to work very hard indeed to fill up this particular fridge freezer. There's a water and ice dispenser on the front of the unit too.

Assuming you have enough physical space to fit the Samsung RS8000 RS68A8820SL into your kitchen, you can't help but be impressed by the aluminium finish and high quality internal materials (including tempered glass for the shelves). A top class fridge freezer from top to bottom.

To get the best price, be sure to check our Samsung discount codes. 

If you have a little bit less money to spend, then you want to make sure that that money goes as far as it possibly can – and that's definitely true with the Beko CFG3582W. It's one of the most affordable fridge freezers around, but it does just about everything that you need.

The 270-litre total capacity across the fridge and freezer compartments is enough for about 14 bags of shopping, according to Beko's calculations. All the usual features that you'd expect are here, including a large crisper drawer for your fruit and veg., and the numerous compartments and shelves give you plenty of flexibility.

As the unit is completely frost-free that's not something you have to worry about, and it's capable of operating in temperatures as low as -15 degrees Celsius – perfect if you're looking for a fridge freezer that you can keep in the garage to make more room in your kitchen.

If you want more capacity than a regular fridge freezer, but don't have space for a full American-style option, the Hotpoint FFU4D balances things nice – it's not as wide as a full-on American unit, but still has four doors and a lot of extra room: 452 litres in total. Add in frost-free operation and different temperature zones, and you've got a fridge freezer that's very impressive indeed.

At 1955 x 700 x 780mm, you won't be able to fit in all the spaces that a smaller freestanding unit could, but if you've got just a bit of flexibility in your space, it really opens things up. So to speak.

The interior ventilation is also designed to help make sure that bacteria and smells from your more pungent favourite foods don't impact on anything else, so it all feels fresher.

This keenly-priced offering from Beko may be exactly what you’re looking for: for its size, it's blooming large inside, with five thoughtfully designed full-depth drawers and six shelves across the both fridge and freezer sections, plus a handy five-bottle wine rack. It’s rather handsome to look at too, which helps.

These aren’t the main reasons why users have been singing its praise, though. Beko has developed an interior lighting system for the fruit and veg container that "mimics the natural sunlight cycle to preserve vitamins in vegetables and fruit" for longer – it changes the interior lighting scheme from blue to green to red followed by 12 hours of darkness, hence the HarvestFresh moniker.

The current consensus among Beko users is that the system works very well. In fact one user conducted her own experiment by placing lettuce and tomatoes of the same age in her Beko and an older fridge: according to her admittedly not very scientific experiment, the lettuces seemed much the same but the tomatoes in the Beko were "definitely firmer", and that alone is worth a round of applause. Fancy a well-priced 50/50 fridge freezer with some tantalising tech on board? This one seems to fit the bill.

Freestanding fridge-freezers don’t come much better than the ZNME36FU0, which we're very impressed by. Thanks to the separate cooling systems for both fridge and freezer, you can keep everything at the perfect temperature no matter which part of the unit it's being stored in.

The capacity is worth a mention too, because this 70/30 fridge freezer offers a total of 360 litres of room, which is enough to hold 20 bags of food shopping according to Zanussi's calculations. As the unit is frost-free as well, you don't have any maintenance to worry about once the groceries are put away.

A special mention too for the salad crisper drawer that keeps your fruit and veg nicely organised and fresh, as well as the reversible doors that can be opened from the left or the right to best suit your kitchen layout.

How to choose the best fridge freezer for you

Generally, fridge freezers just stand there, looking boring, full of food. But try living without one and see how you get on. So which one do you need? The obvious answer to this is, "one that's big enough for your needs, and works". You could easily buy an anonymous, built-in unit, and not think about it again for another 10 years or so.

Fridge freezers come in three styles: single door models with a 60/40 and 50/50 split between fridge and freezer and, for those with extra space, two-door American-style leviathans that resemble portals to another universe made entirely of food and booze.

Most modern fridge freezers models come stacked to the rafters with clever tech that controls humidity and temperature. Others go even further to include app-based diagnostics, automatic door opening and internet-connectivity.

Do you need that techy icing applied to the top of your food-storage cake? No you do not. Would you like to have them? Hell yeah.