The Dinamica Plus Connected and the Dinamica Plus are one machine wearing two spec sheets

De'Longhi Dinamica Plus Connected Espresso & Coffee Machine with Automatic Milk Frother, 18 Recipes, Built in Grinder, App Compatible, LatteCrema Technology for Ideal Milk Texture, Color Touch Display

VS

De'Longhi Dinamica Plus

De'Longhi sells the Dinamica Plus twice and lets the two boxes argue with each other. The titanium ECAM37095TI leads on Bluetooth and the Coffee Link app, promises eighteen recipes in its Amazon title, then offers you "one of our 16 barista-style beverages" four lines down in its own description, and stores three user profiles inside the app. The silver ECAM38085SB drops the app entirely, claims twenty-four one-touch drinks and four profiles, and adds ristretto, cortado, galão and café con leche to the menu list. It is also the model De'Longhi's own US product page now presents as the Dinamica Plus, which tells you which way the range is moving.

Nobody can keep them straight, including the people who own them. One Connected owner wrote in his own five-star Amazon review that the newer Dinamica Plus differs from his machine by having a touch screen instead of touch buttons. That is not the difference. Both listings describe the same 3.5-inch TFT full-touch colour display and the same thirteen-setting conical burr grinder, and both are built around the same LatteCrema carafe.

So the question is narrower than the marketing makes it look. You are not choosing between a smart machine and a dumb one, or between an old grinder and a new one. You are choosing between an app that can set a drink to a number of millilitres and a machine that cannot, and then paying whatever the current gap between the two listings happens to be for that single capability. Everything else on the comparison sheet is naming.

Nobody at Espresso Den has pulled a shot on either machine, and nothing below is presented as our own measurement. This page is built from both Amazon listings, the customer reviews on each of them, De'Longhi's own product page and the long-form reviews of the Connected model, cross-read against our full Dinamica Plus review, which covers the shared hardware in far more depth than a comparison needs to.

De'Longhi Dinamica Plus Connected Espresso & Coffee Machine with Automatic Milk Frother, 18 Recipes, Built in Grinder, App Compatible, LatteCrema Technology for Ideal Milk Texture, Color Touch Display

De'Longhi Dinamica Plus

At a Glance

What the app actually does, and what it very much does not

Start with the thing the icon on the machine gets wrong. Coffee Link is Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi, so the phone has to be in the same room as the coffee. One owner does enjoy waking the machine from the next room and starting a drink remotely, and is honest enough to file it under fun rather than useful. That is the ceiling of the connected life this box is selling.

Pairing is a lottery rather than a process. The same owner needed a call to De'Longhi technical support to get his iPhone talking to the machine, while his wife's phone connected immediately, in the same house, on the same day. A French-speaking owner describes the Bluetooth setup as a bit complicated to figure out and working fine once it is done, and then delivers the line that ought to be printed on the carton: you do not buy this machine for the app, you buy it for good coffee. The reviewer who lived with the Connected model for nine months and liked it is blunter still, describing an app that is slow, clunky and prone to closing itself, and admitting he stopped opening it once setup was done.

And yet there is one genuine reason to want it, and it is the only reason worth paying for. On the Connected model you can build a recipe as numbers, telling the machine you want thirty-four millilitres rather than approximating it. Without the app, customising a drink means brewing one and pressing stop when the cup looks right, which is guesswork performed with a mug in the way. If you are the sort of person who wants a repeatable double rather than roughly a third of a cup, that difference is real, and it is the whole case for the older box.

What the silver one hands back in exchange

The non-connected model answers with a fourth user profile, three named milk textures instead of an unlabelled dial, and a menu that has grown from sixteen or eighteen drinks to twenty-four. The fourth profile is the one that matters in a four-person household. The foam settings, light, creamy and dense, are the same LatteCrema mechanism with clearer wording on the screen.

Treat the drink count as packaging. The reviewer who worked through the whole De'Longhi menu found the long lists to be slight variations on the same few drinks, relaunched the way a fast-food chain relaunches the same ingredients in a new wrapper. A cortado is an espresso with less milk than a cappuccino. Adding six of those to the screen does not change what the grinder or the pump does, and every long-term owner in the research had settled on one or two drinks anyway.

One piece of that listing deserves calling out, because it will mislead somebody. The newer machine's Amazon title advertises an "Automatic Milk Steam Wand with 3 Frother Modes", and bullet four of the same listing correctly describes the LatteCrema Hot System, a thermal carafe that plugs into the side of the machine. There is no manual wand on either of these machines, on any model in the Dinamica Plus line, and if steaming milk yourself is part of the appeal then the case for a wand over a carafe is the thing to read before you spend anything here. The same listing's claim to be the number one super-automatic in the United States is a brand-supplied unit-share figure from a retail tracking service, which measures how many were sold and not how good they are.

Read that last row carefully rather than as a scoreboard. The Connected model has been on sale long enough to accumulate every app complaint, every failed pairing and every dead-on-arrival unit of a long production run, while the silver machine's average rests on a small, young sample written mostly by people still in the honeymoon phase. The complaints below appear on both listings, which is the more telling fact.

The faults you buy whichever box you open

The milk carafe port seizes. A Connected owner needs so much force to pull the carafe off after a brew that he expects to break the connector, bought an entire replacement carafe, and found the new one behaved exactly the same way, which puts the fault on the machine rather than the jug. An owner of the newer silver model describes the identical thing in the identical words, an extremely snug port that appears to form a vacuum seal after brewing, and the same fear of snapping something. With a full carafe going in and out of the fridge several times a day, that is friction you meet at every latte, and it survived the model change intact.

The purge cycles are the second thing every owner mentions and neither listing does. The machine rinses on power-up, after a drink and again on shutdown, and owners of both models keep a glass permanently parked under the spout to catch it, because the alternative is a drip tray full of dirty water. One Connected owner points out the knock-on effect nobody warns you about, which is that all that flushing pulls water through the softening filter and shortens its life.

Out-of-box water-circuit faults are the most repeated hard failure across both listings, and they are worth planning for. One buyer took delivery of two silver machines, a renewed unit that leaked internally and a new one that would not prime, and returned both. On the Connected listing, one owner fought a Water Circuit Empty alert that would not reset and gave up, and another found the plastic locating lip on the water tank snapped in transit, so the machine never registered that the tank was fitted. Unpack whichever one you buy, inspect the tank before you fall in love with the thing, and apply our notes on buying these renewed with some force, because the renewed unit in that pair was the one that had clearly never been tested.

Support behaves the same way for both. Ask De'Longhi for a part and it goes well: a replacement water tank shipped the same day with a tracking number and arrived inside a week, and the owner raised his review to five stars for it. Ask them to diagnose something and you get a request for the invoice, then photographs of the serial number, then a video, then nothing, which is the sequence two separate owners describe before abandoning the conversation. Register the machine when you unbox it either way, because owners report an additional year of warranty for doing so.

Then temperature, which is the standing complaint against the whole LatteCrema line and is not fixed by either purchase. A Connected owner who mainly drinks cappuccinos preheats his mug in the microwave to keep the drink hot, and offers it as his single most useful tip. There is a genuine counterweight on the newer listing: an owner who has used this model elsewhere for years says the biggest improvement in the current machine is how hot the drinks are, and that the temperature is adjustable in the settings. Another silver owner gets there by running a manual hot water flush before brewing if the machine has been sitting idle. All three of those are workarounds rather than refutations, and our piece on why bean-to-cup milk runs lukewarm explains why the category behaves this way rather than treating it as a defect in one unit.

De'Longhi Dinamica Plus Connected Espresso & Coffee Machine with Automatic Milk Frother, 18 Recipes, Built in Grinder, App Compatible, LatteCrema Technology for Ideal Milk Texture, Color Touch Display

De'Longhi Dinamica Plus

Which box belongs on your counter

The honest split is short. If you will set your drinks once, at the machine, and never think about them again, the silver model is the better buy and costs you nothing that lands in the cup. If precision matters enough that you would rather type a number than stand there with a thumb over a stop button, the Connected model is the only route to that on this line, and you should expect to fight the app for an evening and then never open it again.

If neither of those descriptions fits, the money probably wants to go somewhere else entirely. Spend less and accept a smaller puck and you are looking at the Magnifica Evo, which uses the same carafe technology, and our Dinamica Plus against Magnifica Evo comparison is the one that decides that question. If two people in the house drink different beans, the Rivelia swaps hoppers instead of making you feed the pre-ground chute, and running decaf through a bean-to-cup machine explains why that matters more than it sounds. If the carafe port and the purge glass have put you off De'Longhi's plumbing altogether, the Philips 5500 against this machine is the cleaner-to-live-with alternative, and the full De'Longhi ladder maps everything in between.