The verdict
Buy the 6-quart Instant Pot Duo Plus. Instant Brands lists nine cooking functions for it by name — pressure cook, slow cook, steam, sauté, sous vide, make rice, yogurt, cake and keep warm — which means you get the yogurt program plus the sous vide program, and both are low-and-slow holds that use the same part of the machine. It has the 18/8 stainless tri-ply inner pot, which is the pot you want for scalding milk, and the WhisperQuiet release. Buy the Instant Pot Pro if you jar your yogurt, because Instant Brands' ten-function list for it is the only one here that includes sterilize. Buy the plain Duo if you just want the cheapest pot that does this properly — yogurt is in its published seven-function list, and nothing about the yogurt is worse. Buy the 8-quart Duo Plus if you make a gallon and a half at a time.
The thing to take away before the rankings: this is a feature-list question, not a quality question. Every model below holds the milk at incubation temperature the same way. What differs is capacity, what else the pot can do, and whether sterilize is on the list.
Which Instant Pots actually list a yogurt function
We checked each model against Instant Brands' own product page, which itemizes the cooking functions by name rather than leaving you to infer them from a count. Verified 2026-10-17:
Function lists exactly as Instant Brands words them on each model's own product page. A function count on its own tells you nothing — two models here are both “7 Cooking Functions” and the longest list on the site does not include this one.| Model | Published cooking functions | Yogurt? |
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| Duo 6qt | Pressure cook, slow cook, sauté, steam, make rice, yogurt, keep warm (7) | Yes |
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| Duo Plus 6qt | Pressure cook, slow cook, steam, sauté, sous vide, make rice, yogurt, cake, keep warm (9) | Yes |
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| Duo Plus 8qt | The same nine functions as the 6-quart Duo Plus | Yes |
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| Pro 6qt | Pressure cook, slow cook, sous vide, sauté, sterilize, cook yogurt and rice, bake, steam, keep warm (10) | Yes |
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| RIO 6qt | Pressure cook, slow cook, sauté, steam, make rice, yogurt, keep warm (7) | Yes |
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| Duo Crisp with Ultimate Lid | 13-in-1; Instant Brands names pressure, air fry, bake, dehydrate, sous vide and proof | Not named |
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That last row is the one to be careful about, and it is why this page exists. The Duo Crisp is the most expensive and most capable Instant Pot on this site, with the longest function count, and yogurt is not among the functions Instant Brands names for it. Buying up the range is not a reliable way to get this feature. If you own a model and are unsure, our guide to the button panel walks the presets, and the yogurt method page covers what to do if there is no button at all.
What the yogurt button is doing, and why it is the hard part
Yogurt is a two-temperature job. The milk goes up to roughly 180 °F to denature the proteins, which is what makes the finished yogurt thick rather than thin; it comes down to around 110 °F before the starter goes in, because hotter than that kills the live cultures; and then it has to be held near 110 °F for about eight hours while the culture works.
The holding is the part no ordinary pressure program can do. Keep Warm is not it — it is designed to hold cooked food at a safe serving temperature, which is far above incubation, and it will kill the culture. The yogurt program exists precisely because holding a low temperature steady for eight hours needs its own control logic. That is also why the Pro and the Duo Plus, which both publish a sous vide program as well, are the most interesting pots here: sous vide is the same engineering problem with a different set point, and a cooker that does one tends to do the other. What sous vide actually is covers that overlap, and whether you still need a circulator is the honest follow-up.
Capacity, in gallons of milk rather than quarts of pot
Yogurt is the one use where people routinely fill the pot, because a batch keeps for about a week and making it is an eight-hour commitment either way. The published capacities: 6 quarts for the Duo, the Duo Plus and the Pro; 8.0 quarts for the large Duo Plus, which Instant Brands rates for up to eight servings.
In milk terms, a 6-quart pot comfortably takes a gallon (4 quarts) with headroom for the scald, and an 8-quart pot takes a gallon and a half. Unlike pressure cooking, there is no two-thirds fill rule in play here — you are not pressurizing — so the usable volume is closer to the nameplate than it is anywhere else on this site. If a gallon a week is the plan, the 6-quart is enough and the 8-quart is a bigger thing to store.
Why the stainless pot matters for milk
Scalded milk sticks and scorches, and the pot gets scrubbed. The Duo, the Duo Plus in both sizes and the RIO all publish an 18/8 stainless inner pot with a tri-ply base; Instant Brands describes the Pro's as dishwasher-safe stainless. There is no coating in any of them to wear through, which over years of yogurt is worth more than it sounds — a nonstick pot that has been scoured after every scald is a pot with a finite life. Our pot-materials roundup records what every maker on the site states.
The practical technique that saves the pot either way is pot-in-pot: scald and incubate in a separate vessel sitting on a trivet inside the cooker, so the milk never touches the Instant Pot's own pot. Our pot-in-pot guide covers the method, and it is also how people make yogurt in individual jars.
Sterilize, and who actually needs it
Instant Brands lists sterilize among the Pro's ten cooking functions, and it is the only pot on this page where it appears. It matters in one specific scenario: if your yogurt goes into glass jars that you want clean to a standard beyond “washed”, the Pro will steam them for you rather than sending you to a boiling pot on the stove. If your yogurt goes into a tub in the fridge and gets eaten in a week, it is a function you will press once.
We flag it because it is the single documented reason to spend Pro money for this job, and because the rest of the Pro's premium — the auto-sealing lid, the programmable buttons, the dial — buys you nothing at all for yogurt. The Pro against the Duo Plus comparison works through whether that premium is worth it generally.
Who should buy what
Most people: the 6-quart Duo Plus. Yogurt and sous vide on a stainless pot, a gallon at a time, for less than the Pro. Jar-and-store people: the Pro, for the sterilize program. Cheapest route in: the Duo, whose published seven functions include yogurt and which is still the best-value well-documented multicooker on the site. Gallon-and-a-half batches: the 8-quart Duo Plus. And if you already own an Instant Pot, check the function list on its product page before you buy anything — there is a decent chance you already have the button, and the method page is all you need.
