The Acaia Pearl is our favorite coffee scale right now. It’s the best all around scale for a number of reasons, and depite its steep price ($150 MSRP). The Pearl is large enough for use as a pourover coffee scale while being water-ressistant and sensitive enough for espresso use. It’s also super quick to turn on, weigh, tare, and turn off, and has Bluetooth so you can utilize advanced features by pairing the scale with your phone and using your phone as a display for the scale.

The downsides of the Acaia Pearl scale (aside from the steep price) are few and far between, but they are: the height of the scale makes it too tall to be places under the portafilter of many espresso machines, the body of the scale is plastic so you need to be careful about putting hot objects on it, and the scale is not waterproof/espresso-proof.

The Acaia Pearl is general preferable to the original Pearl (the white one) as the Black is generally easier to read in normal to high light environments. The newer Pearl Model S is even better.

Functionally the two scales are the same, but the white is $10 cheaper. The Pearl is older, much larger, and has no metal parts, which makes it less preferable to the Acaia Lunar to many professional users, but the Pearl is actually a better coffee scale, as the Lunar is too small to place a pour-over setup on top of. Some users even prefer the Pearl for espresso — its larger size makes weighing a portafilter on top of it very easy, where the same task can be a challenge on the tiny Lunar scale.