The 2 Best Vegan Butters of 2025

If you want the best butter substitute, regardless of the price (and if you can find it in stores near you): Monty’s Original Pure Plant-Based Cloud Butter is an impressive, high-end vegan butter. It has a somewhat cheesy dairy flavor and a rich, creamy texture. It won out in our sugar-cookies baking test — cookies we made with the Monty’s plant-based butter held some of their shape and maintained a chewy, slightly underdone center evocative of Levain-style cookies, while every other cookie spread thin and flat. If we could get an unlimited supply of any of these vegan butters, we would pick Monty’s. But this vegan butter is the most expensive we’ve tasted (about $13 for 5 ounces at this writing), and we can’t imagine splurging on it regularly. Plus, the Monty’s spread might not be easy to find in your area, and for now, it can only be purchased online in a 6-count case.

If you want a palm-oil-free option: Most tasters found Wayfare Dairy Free Salted & Whipped Butter to be sweet, slightly salty, and mild, free of the artificial butter flavor that overpowered other options, though vegetal in flavor. Our panel unanimously deemed its appearance challenging—the thick, grayish spread reminded multiple tasters of plaster. This vegan butter looks and tastes plant-based. But it spread well on bread, it was smooth, and it was palatable enough for most tasters.

If you’re making frosting or you want to know which of the widely available Country Crock spreads is the best: We preferred Country Crock Plant Butter with Olive Oil to the company’s avocado-oil option. Though the two were similar, the base flavor of the olive-oil spread did more to meld with the strong faux butter flavor that both options have. (The olive oil spread comes in sticks, too.)

The Country Crock olive-oil vegan butter was one of the easiest vegan butters for us to bake with, mixing and creaming more similarly to dairy butter than other options, though the cookies still had too much spread. It shone in our frosting test, yielding results with a texture somewhere between that of fluffy canned frosting and actually decent buttercream. And the flavor was fine, with no lingering offness that could ruin a cake.

On bread, the spread was grainy and a little oily but easily spreadable. On its own, it had a slightly sweet, baked-goods flavor, as if it already contained flour and sugar, so it was not our favorite option when we ate it with bread.