The probe-less side is discontinued. This page compared the two-level XL Ninja with a thermometer against the same oven without one. As of November 2026 the one without is gone: the 10-in-1 DT201 went “Currently unavailable” in October, the 8-in-1 DT202BK that replaced it followed in November, and SharkNinja's whole DT200 flat-oven line has left Amazon US. The only listing still carrying the name is a used Amazon Resale unit priced well above what the oven cost new, so there is no buy link on this page for it.
The full record is on its review.
The DT551is therefore the only two-level XL Ninja cavity still on sale, and the live version of this question is no longer “probe or no probe” but “is the probe and the second level worth the step up from Ninja's French-door oven?” The cards below are that comparison. The history is kept because the answer to the old question is still useful, and because the model codes are still what people search.
The short answer
Buy the DT551 if you roast to internal temperature often or genuinely need two cooking levels in one cavity; otherwise the FO101 French Door Premier does the rest of the job for less, with a door that is easier to live with. Neither publishes a wattage, which is the thing the discontinued XL Pro did better than anything else Ninja sells, so neither gets a running-cost figure from us. If the cross-shop is outside the brand, the Instant Omni Plus publishes the interior volume and the temperature range that neither of these Ninjas does.
What the comparison used to be
Almost nothing separated the two. Both were single-cavity XL boxes with two genuine cooking levels, the same 1,800-watt class of element and the same large footprint, quoting capacity differently rather than being differently sized: Ninja described the DT202BK as taking two 12-inch pizzas, or a 5-pound chicken and a sheet pan of vegetables at once, and the DT551 as taking two 9x9 trays, nine slices of toast or a 12-pound turkey. The DT551 was the 10-in-1 and the DT202BK the 8-in-1 — Dehydrate and Reheat on one dial and not the other — and the documentation gap ran the other way: SharkNinja published a rated 1,800 W for the DT200 series in its own owner's guide and publishes none at all for the DT551. That last point is why the line going away made the brand's paper trail worse.
What the probe is worth
Everything, or nothing, depending on what you cook. A roast, a whole chicken, a pork loin, a thick steak — these are cooked correctly to a number, and a probe removes the largest source of home-roasting failure. A tray of fries, toast, or reheated pizza has no meaningful internal temperature, so the probe sits unused. For two years that argument came with a price test against the probe-less sibling, which swung from “about ten dollars” to “roughly two and a half times” inside a single autumn. With the sibling gone, the test is simpler and harsher: a decent instant-read thermometer costs a fraction of the step up from any cheaper oven, and the only thing it will not do for you is stop the cook.
The decision rule
Buy the DT551 ifyou roast to internal temperature often enough that stopping the oven for you is worth real money, or if you need two cooking levels in one cavity — it is the only Ninja that still has them. Buy the FO101 if most of your cooking is trays rather than roasts and you would rather have a one-handed French door and ten named functions for less. Buy neither on documentation— SharkNinja publishes no wattage and no cavity volume for either, and the Ninja oven that did publish both is the one this page used to compare.
If counter space is the real constraint rather than the probe, the flip-away Ninja SP line folds away, the SP101 is the one Ninja oven left with a published wattage, and higher SP trims pair vertical storage with a thermometer of their own — the probe without the footprint.
And if the thing you actually want from a bigger Ninja is two temperatures at once rather than a probe, the Double Oven with FlexDoor against the XL Pro is the page that works it through — with the same caveat as here: Ninja publishes no wattage for the Double Oven either.
How we picked
Ovens we claim to have cooked in: 0
Everyone in this category tells you they roasted forty chickens. We have roasted none, and we say so. Here is what we do instead: read the manufacturer's manual and spec sheet, record the published wattage, interior volume, temperature range and warranty term, work out what the oven costs to run for an hour and for a year, show the arithmetic so you can redo it with your own electricity rate, and cite all of it. Where a brand publishes no wattage, we print no running cost rather than borrowing a number from a similar model. Prices come live from Amazon's API and disappear rather than go stale.
The scores above are judgments from that documented research — not test results. One of the five metrics is Documentation: whether the manufacturer will tell you what its oven draws at all. The full rubric, including what disqualifies an oven, is published in full.
