7 Chain Pepperoni Pizzas, Ranked Worst To Best

If there is one food I can claim authority on, it's pizza. At some point in my childhood, I declared to my mom, "Friday nights are pizza nights!" and she laughed and kind of agreed. I've been having pizza almost every Friday night for three decades since — and occasionally (often) a day or two in between.

I'm not here to debate the authenticity of pizza or whether pineapple is an appropriate topping (it is). I'm here to talk about the relative awesomeness of the many American pizza styles and the chains that claim to exemplify them.

With all that in mind, I set out to try seven pepperoni pizzas from chains available across the United States to determine which one is truly the best. This was especially challenging because I'm a firm believer that there are very few bad pizzas in the world. As long as you have bread, sauce, and cheese, it's hard to go wrong. But I did, at last, manage to come up with a definitive ranking based on a few key factors: the quality of the pizza as a whole, the quality of the individual components, and value for the price, with a passing mention of one quintessential eater criterion: leftover quality, because sometimes the best part of having pizza is having more pizza the next day.

When I say there's almost no such thing as a bad pizza, I mean it, and Little Caesars is the perfect example of that. The main thing the Little Caesars pepperoni pizza had going for it was the price. Though I'm old enough to remember the days when a large Hot-n-Ready pizza was $5, at $6.79 for a ginormous pizza, Little Caesars is still a great deal. It only took about one slice to fill me up as much as the entire Donato's individual pizza, so if you're hungry and your wallet's feeling a little light, Little Caesars is hard to beat.

The flavor is good, too, but the texture is a bit off. I was hoping for more crispness in the crust, but even the very bottom is soft, and the bread is spongy and pretty bland overall. The pepperoni is crisp and heavy on the spices — I don't hate it, personally, but I know my kids would complain about it being too spicy. 

You've got to be ready to eat it all in one go, though, because it's absolutely inedible as leftovers. By the time I went to heat it up the next day, the cheese had congealed into a plastic-like shell that even a 350-degree oven couldn't fix, and had developed an unsettling foot-like flavor. But the biggest downside of all was the heartburn that kept me up all night in a way none of the other pizzas did.

Donatos is a chain based in Columbus, Ohio, but its pizzas are also served in Red Robin restaurants nationwide. And while it's delicious, the biggest thing I can say about the Donatos pizza is that it's tiny. The name "individual" is a bit of an overstatement — it's more like a snack. I picked up my Little Caesars and Donatos pizzas in the same run, and the difference between them was striking. You could fit almost four whole Donatos individual pizza boxes into the Little Caesars large pizza box. So while the $6.19 price is reasonable, the value is not.

The crust is cracker-thin and crispy but not too crunchy, which is nice, and the pepperoni has a rich, savory flavor that's very different from the spicy pepperoni served elsewhere. The square cut on a round pizza is a little strange, but it does make the pieces easy to hold and take nice, satisfying bites out of. I love how crispy the pepperoni is, and it is absolutely covered with them from edge to edge.

I love Donatos pizza. It's a fantastic pizza. I'm already craving another one. But I could probably eat an entire 14-inch Donatos pizza by myself if I had it sitting open on the coffee table while binging a K-Drama or playing a game. Thin crusts are just inherently not as filling, no matter how tasty they are. It's honestly a little insulting to pay six bucks for lunch and get the volumetric equivalent of a Lunchable. I just know I'm gonna be hungry again in an hour, and there were obviously no leftovers to speak of.

My family was a Papa John's family for most of my childhood, but when we moved to a city without a location of the pizza chain, we reluctantly changed our Friday night tradition to Domino's. Of course, that was before the big 2009 recipe overhaul, and today, it's nothing like I remember it being.

Dominos crust, though medium in thickness, was the crispiest of the big three chains I tried, and I really like the cornmeal baked into the bottom. The sauce and the pepperoni both have more spice than most of the other restaurants, so the overall flavor of the Domino's pizza is very robust, especially with the seasoned garlic crust. In fact, it's almost too robust. Everything is so heavily seasoned that it's hard to taste the pizza under the spices — it's overwhelming, especially if you're hoping for a comfort food pizza.

My biggest complaint is that the cheese is thin and spotty, but that's a big complaint, because cheese is the most important part of any pizza, in my opinion. I distinctly remember there being much more cheese on the pre-overhaul Dominos pizza, and was disappointed to find so little on this one.

The price is right, though, at 9.99 for a small pizza, which would probably be enough to split between two people for lunch. Even better, Dominos periodically runs 50% off all regularly priced pizzas online, and I got to take advantage of that deal to get the pizza for $5. And as for leftovers, it held up reasonably well, though the spotty cheese left the reheated slices quite dry.

As hard as I tried to get the original crust for all of the chains on this list for the sake of consistency, Pizza Hut forced my hand, as its personal size only comes in the pan crust. That's okay, though — it is our favorite crust from Pizza Hut, and although I'm a big fan of scientific rigor, I'm an even bigger fan of a thick crust. Pizza Hut's is light and fluffy, with lightly crisp edges. The cheese is a little thin, though, and not spread all the way to the edges, missing an opportunity to caramelize the cheese around the crust. The pepperoni is so mild you could almost miss it, but I do like the flavor overall, and it's definitely a pepperoni pizza I could get my kids to eat.

In terms of value for the price, the Pizza Hut personal pan size is about the same diameter as the Donatos individual, but you could stack three or four Donatos pizzas before they reached the depth of the Pizza Hut one. For 50 cents more than Donatos, that's a huge value. I did not, however, have any leftovers, as the Personal Pan pizza was exactly the right size for lunch.

Papa John's is my go-to chain pizza, and has been for most of my life. It's all about the crust: lightly sweet, crispy on the outside and pillowy on the inside, and the perfect vehicle for the infamous garlic dipping sauce, which comes free with every pizza (though I always end up ordering more). The cheese is thick and gooey, the sauce is rich and robust, and the pepperoni has crunchy edges and just the right amount of spice. And while I never eat the pepper that comes in every box, it always leaves just a trace of pepper flavor on the crust that sets it apart from any other pizza place.

I was also impressed with the size of Papa John's smallest pizza (the second-largest "small" of the chains I tried), and the price falls roughly in the middle of the pack. The leftovers were just as good as the first time around, with the cheese re-melting perfectly and the crust staying crisp without becoming too crunchy. I have absolutely nothing to complain about. This one is hard to beat for me, so imagine my surprise when, on my very last pizza run for this article, I found two pizzas to beat it.

I seem to remember not loving Godfather's pizza in the past, but I'm certainly a fan of it today. The crust is thick but not dense at all, and the edges have the kind of crunch you can only get from a pan. The sauce is savory but not too intense, and the pepperoni is thin, crunchy, and flavorful. There's a lot of gooey mozzarella cheese, and a lot of pizza for the price.

I got a mini pizza from a Godfather's Pizza Express, the limited-menu version found in convenience stores like Love's, food courts, etc., and it was enough for a meal and only $6.29. At full-service Godfather's Pizza restaurants, the smallest size — individual — is $11.25, but when the mini was roughly the size I expected the individual to be, I can only imagine how much pizza you get for that price. It's an awesome value, and the leftovers were every bit as satisfying as when the pizza was fresh. I reluctantly admitted that I had been wrong about Godfather's Pizza and headed out to pick up my very last pie for this list.

I'd had (and loved) Jet's Pizza before, but it was when I had just moved to Colorado after only having access to the big three pizza places for most of my life, so I assumed it was mainly better due to novelty. I was not at all prepared for it to be my favorite pepperoni pizza out of all of the ones I tried.

The first thing I noticed about this pizza is that it is heavy. It's a lot of food for the price, definitely shareable as long as you're not both starving, and I even did a little happy dance when I got home and opened the box. Detroit-style pizza is my favorite because it seems to have so much of everything — crust, sauce, and cheese — and Jet's Pizza gets Detroit-style just right.

The cheese is scattered all the way to the edge of the pan, leaving crispy, lacy, caramelized edges. The pan lets you pile the cheese high, and suddenly it's part pizza, part casserole. The pepperoni is crispy on the edges, and the sauce has just the right blend of flavors. I could eat this pizza every day for the rest of my life, and everything that was good about it only got better when I reheated it the next day. Jet's is a top-tier pepperoni pizza.

I chose seven pizza chains near me with national or semi-national availability. At each one, I ordered the restaurant's original pizza crust (except at Pizza Hut, which only has the individual size in the pan crust) with pepperoni. No matter how tempting the options were, I stuck with the basics: no stuffed-crust, specialty pizzas, or anything else that didn't come with the default order.

I evaluated each restaurant's pepperoni pizza on a variety of factors, including overall pizza flavor, quality of the components (crust, cheese, pepperoni), and value for the price. I then painstakingly ranked them from worst to best — or, more accurately, least awesome to most awesome.