Best small printers 2025: The best compact printers for business

Choosing the best printer for a small business can be a tricky process, requiring careful consideration in terms of costs, maintenance, and, ultimately, convenience.

If you’re hoping to tuck your printer away in a bookshelf or squeeze it onto a desk, choosing a bulkier model is a surefire way to cause headaches and clutter up your workspace.

Notably, opting for a device that gets the job done is crucial. Luckily there’s no shortage of capable printers out there on the market.

As with any purchase though, choosing a printer is often a case of making concessions – be that in terms of price, quality, and even speed. The reality is that manufacturers simply can’t fit everything into these compact devices, but if you shop around you’ll find there are options that tick most of the necessary boxes.

With that in mind, if you’re looking for a compact business printer, here are five of the best out there on the market. Our selection ranges from a sub-£60 marvel right through to a do-it-all laser MFP.

What to look for in a small business printer

You’re going to be let down if you’re hoping to cram every printing feature into the smallest device around. Compact printers often lack useful features like multiple paper trays, for example.

Similarly, if it’s a small multifunctional peripheral (MFP), then this might not have room for an automatic document feeder (ADF), which enables multi-page scans, copies, and faxes.

We’ve found that smaller consumables also come with added risks, often requiring more frequent maintenance and slightly higher running costs. For a small business working on a tight budget, this presents major challenges.

So, if you’re looking to keep those costs down, perhaps stick to refillable inkjets, which offer roughly the lowest cost of ownership out there.

Size matters with printers

Size is critical, especially for those working in a home office or small business office. The last thing you want is a bulky printer swamping a workstation. When choosing a printer with this in mind, consider whether you can get by with a single-function printer, rather than an MFP.

These offer the ability to create decent photocopies using your phone camera via the manufacturer’s app. It’s worth noting, however, that this won’t help if you need to fax, and it’ll probably become annoying if you make lots of copies.

With that in mind, it's important to plan ahead. You might find it's better to buy a slightly larger and more capable MFP now than, for example, buy a very compact printer that can't cope as your business takes off.

If you can compromise a little on space, you can still get feature-rich small printers. Take the Xerox B315DN in our guide (below): it packs duplex printing and scanning with an ADF into a 0.15m2 footprint – only about twice the very smallest printers.

Some features simply can't be shrunk, though. If you must have an A3-capable printer, you'll just have to find somewhere with the space for it.

Whatever small printer for business you're considering, don't compromise on quality. Focus on something that balances decent speeds with reasonable results, and you won't find yourself wishing you'd spent more – or worse, buying a new printer just a few months down the line. In this list, we've focused on small printers that deliver on the basics, but each has its own special talents.

The best small printers

If space concerns are absolutely everything, then you won't find smaller than this. Indeed, as our review says, "we've eaten bigger boxes of chocolates". This 1.6kg printer is intended for travel, rather than to live out its days in a single location. It even packs an internal battery, which means you can print from a laptop on a train if you really want.

Of course, making a product so small does come with drawbacks: there's no scanning or photocopying, and it's incapable of duplex printing. It doesn't even have a paper output tray, such is its dedication to compactness, and the input's only good for 20 sheets. Performance is a little on the slow side, too, at just 6.9 pages per minute, or 2.2ppm for our complex color test. Running costs are also high, with mono pages hitting 6p per page once the initial ink supply runs dry.

But you won't find a tinier footprint than this, and for that reason alone the Epson WorkForce WF-110W deserves a place on our list of the best small printers.

Price when reviewed: £158 exc. VAT

Read our full Epson WorkForce WF-110W review for more information

The Canon MAXIFY BX110 is perfectly suited for workstations and small office spaces given its compact size. Better still, if you’re printing while on the go, it’s a neat device that’s easily transportable.

Indeed, the MXIFY BX110 is slightly smaller than a ream of paper, underlining its seriously small design.

The inkjet printer doesn’t lack in terms of features, either, and packs in all the options you’d expect to find from a regular-sized device – it even comes with a small screen and control panel for added accessibility and ease of use.

Under the hood, we have a couple of small ink tanks. One of these contains black ink, with the other includes cyan, magenta, and yellow inks.

On the transportability front, it’s easy to take with you on the go, featuring a removable, rechargeable lithium-ion battery. If you’re keeping it in an office space, it can be plugged in and recharged. The device can be connected to a workstation using a USB-C cable, or via a Wi-Fi network.

Where it lacks is in volume when compared to larger options on the market. The device naturally doesn’t accommodate big ink tanks, yet this can be expected to produce around 200 black or 260 color pages.

This means you could find yourself changing cartridges on a regular basis, but current color ink pricing means you could still only pay around 8p for an A4 page of mixed text and graphics.

Read our full review of the Canon MAXIFY BX110 for more information.

Price when reviewed: £185 exc. VAT

If you want a compact printer with low running costs, there's no better choice than a refillable inkjet. HP's Smart Tank 7005 is a strong example, arriving with enough ink to cover around 12,000 black or 8,000 color pages. That's an incredible value, equating to around 2.3p per page with a free printer thrown in. Once you finish the supplied ink, you'll pay around 0.4p per full-color page, which is almost unbeatable.

It's a good thing, then, that this MFP is competent elsewhere. At 13 pages per minute it's a fast enough text printer for most micro businesses. That's pretty much the story for its color printing, scans, and copies, which are all fast enough for light office use among a few people.

Print and copy quality are generally good, but this MFP's weaknesses in our tests were underwhelming photo prints, and blocky document scans. Still, if you're after a small and smart MFP with ultra-low running costs, and you'll only scan occasionally, the Smart Tank 7005 remains a good choice.

Read our full HP Smart Tank 7005 review for more information.

Canon's MAXIFY GX6550 is a compact and odd-looking MFP with refillable ink tanks. That gives it very low running costs of around 0.5p per page, but its real USP is a scanner with a very unusual portrait orientation. With its ADF accessed from the front, rather than the top or side, the GX6550 is ideal for wedging back into shelving or a tight cubby hole, such as you might find on a reception desk.

This is a fairly strong MFP in most respects, supporting full duplex scans, copies and prints. Its only real omission is a fax modem, which could be an issue if you are buying for reception. One other problem is that the scanner has a small, 5x7" platen, ruling out A4 scans from the glass – you won't be able to open the scanner lid if it's in a confined space, anyway. All in all, the GX6550 could be an excellent choice where you have limited headroom, but if an ultra-small footprint is more important, consider Epson's WorkForce WF-110 (above).

Price when reviewed: £235 exc. VAT

Read our full Canon MAXIFY GX6550 review for more information.

FAQs

It's best to put devices used by other people such as coworkers, housemates or family members in an easily accessible central location, such as a sideboard or end table. If you're going down this route, however, you might want to choose a printer that looks reasonably attractive.

Inkjet printers don't tend to like being left idle for more than a couple of weeks, as it can cause some of their ink nozzles to dry up and become blocked. This reduces their print quality. It's a good idea to print at least a page every month, increasing this frequency if you find the printer still becomes blocked. If it does, check on the display or in the print driver options for print head test patterns and cleaning cycles.

On all printers, you should check regularly for firmware updates, or make sure that automatic updates are enabled. These can be selected via many printer's settings menus, or by running the update program installed with the drivers.

How we test small printers

When testing a printer, there are two key metrics that we measure to assess its performance: speed and image quality. The first of these is measured by running a batch of documents through the machine and timing how long it takes to get through the whole job from the point we hit print, as well as how long it takes to produce the first page.

We use a 25-sheet black-and-white text document to test mono performance, as well as a mixed sheaf of 24 web pages, magazine pages, and presentation slides to test color speed. For inkjet devices, we'll also repeat the mono test at draft quality, and to measure duplex printing, we'll run the first ten pages of the mixed graphics workload, measuring the images per minute.

Image quality, meanwhile, is tested by assessing a series of greyscale pictures, color photos, and mono office documents. For devices with scan functionality, we'll look at the image quality of a scanned office document, color photo, and color input target chart, looking primarily for any evidence of color banding or loss of clarity in both cases.

To measure scan speeds, we time how quickly an MFP can deliver a single photocopy, how quickly it scans at various resolutions, and how quickly preview images appear. In the event that a compact printer includes an ADF, we'll use a ten-page copy job to test its speeds in both mono and color (where we can), and if both it and the printer are duplex, we'll test this with a ten-sheet double-sided batch as well.