For the last year, I've had three robot vacuums working in various parts of my home. I've put them through the paces in a real-world environment, full of furniture, thresholds, uneven flooring, and one Doberman determined to bring the outdoors in. I've tested robots from every major brand, from Roomba to Roborock, and there are lots of little differences to help you choose if one feature really matters to you. Generally, a few robots stand above the rest, but in some cases, the specific setup of your home may help guide you to one vacuum or another.
These days, a robot vacuum that just vacuums is a pretty low bar to meet. The current class of bots all come with self-emptying docks and mopping abilities. In some cases, they can fetch and dispose of their own water.
Every robot claims to be quiet (they're not) and anti-tangle (inevitably untrue), so set your expectations appropriately. While a robot zipping around the room isn't likely to bother you, you're not going to Zoom while it's running. While most robots now handle things like long hair with much more dignity, eventually you're going to leave some yarn around, and your robot vacuum will absolutely find that screw you dropped somewhere last year, and all of those issues will require you to flip the bot over and clear it.
When people are trying to decide which vacuum to choose, there are plenty of sources to go to, and I admit, I often feel a sense of satisfaction when all of us agree on the same models. More often, we disagree, which is proof that different test environments influence the outcome. In my case, I've set up each robot following directions and then left them to work in my own home. There aren't fake obstacle courses—just the detritus that falls on the floor of my kitchen while I cook, and the short dog hair that perpetuates the floor, and random puffs of pet-toy floof. Here's what I've thought of the robots I've tested in the last year.
Anytime I talk about robot vacuums on Lifehacker, I'm quick to praise the Roborock S8 line. I've tried the S8, S8Pro and now the S8 Max V Ultra. Yes, Roborock has too many models and it's confusing—but with each iteration, the model line has added genuine new functionality. The S8 Max V Ultra is one of the robots other reviewers and I seem to agree on, as it's been praised across the board, although I'd say you'd be happy with anything in the S8 line, if the Max V Ultra is a little too rich for your blood.
The Roborock S8 line does the best job of indiscriminately sucking up whatever is on the floor without getting stuck. Rescuing a robot or having to clear its rollers are the biggest annoyance for me and you'll do it less with the S8 line. The rare times it happens, the Roborock has the benefit of a new feature we're seeing in bots: the ability to move it via remote control in the app, so you don't have to crawl on your hands and knees to fish it out from under the couch. The mapping, which is done via LiDAR, is easy to manipulate to create zones and rooms so you can give the robot more specific instructions. The latest versions of the S8 even have a robot assistant on board, though I've found it less than helpful. Instead, integrate your Roborocks into Google or Alexa and use those assistants for voice control.
The S8 Line features one long mopping pad instead of the QRevo line's two spinning pads, and on my floors, the single pad delivered better results. This line has water tanks in the charging dock, and they simply need to be filled and emptied occasionally, but I really enjoy how the latest versions even have a tank for cleaning solution so it's added automatically.
With few exceptions, I'd feel comfortable recommending this model to anyone. In between testing other robots, the latest S8 model is the one working in my home.
The second iteration of the K10+ vacuum managed to improve a robot I already adored. The first thing to know about this particular robot is that it is comparatively tiny. While almost most robot vacuums are getting larger diameters, the K10+ shrunk itself—you can pick it up with one hand. With that small size, it can navigate around your chair legs and other obstacles with a much tighter radius, and really nestle right up to walls.
The K10+ does the job, rarely getting held up by the various types of detritus that litter my floors, and actually leaves a clean floor behind. Low thresholds do nothing to deter the bot. As a vacuum, A+. So much so that my next door neighbors who live in a small house with two small kids and two large dogs, and to whom I gifted my original K10+, can talk of nothing else when we run into one another.
This brings me to the one failure of the K10+—and why it shouldn't matter.
Technically, the K10+ is a vacuum and a mop. Most robots have everything they need on board to switch between being a mop and vacuum and require nothing of you, the user, to do so. The K10+ is different in that you must decide ahead of time if you want to vacuum or mop, and if you choose the latter, must bolt on an additional piece to which you attach the equivalent of a wet nap, which the bot then drags around the floor in the most unsatisfying way humanly possible. Would I prefer it did both? Hell, yeah. But if you just ignore that the robot is a mop to begin with, and focus instead on how good it is at being a vacuum, expecting nothing more, I think you'll be quite pleased.
Every feature you'd expect on a high-end vacuum is found in this model, including an app that easily lets you schedule and manipulate spaces to get the robot to go where you want. One lovely thing about Switchbot is that the vacuum is part of their universal app, which covers all their other products, so you won't need a completely separate app for the vacuum, which is often true. Bonus: This is one of the few robots using the Matter standard, so while it'll integrate with Google and Alexa without a problem, if you're an Apple HomeKIt or Siri user, you'll still be able to integrate.
While the S10 is basically just another high-end robot vacuum and mop, the big deal here is that this model also can refill its own water tank and drain it for you—assuming you connect it to your water line. Let's get that part out of the way, first. There are a number of places in your home, whether your bathroom or laundry room, that will allow you to do this relatively easily. Once you're piped in, there are two docks: a water dock and a vacuum dock. The water dock has a small footprint and height, which means that if you need to tuck it into a bathroom, you'll hardly notice it, and then you can place the vacuum dock somewhere else closer to the action.
The S10 doesn't have to be connected to the water line—you can refill the water yourself—but then I'd recommend getting a different vacuum, since that is the appeal of this model. It's a deeply satisfying experience to remove yet another small bit of labor, even if it's just dumping out some water tanks.
On the more functional front, I am mostly happy with my S10. It's not the best performing vacuum, but it is near the top. The vacuum worked well, but had trouble with thresholds over a half inch and got stuck a few times between the dining room and kitchen. Over time, this seemed to get better. As a mop, I thought the S10's roller did a good, if not the best job. One distinctive quality that seems to matter to people (but not myself, so much) is that the S10 is one of the mops that cleans the mop roller as it works, rather only cleaning the pad when it returns to the station.
Switchbot packed this robot full of features, including all the ones you'd expect from high end models: remote control, the ability to break maps into rooms and zones, and create complicated schedules with priority.
If this model were more expensive, in the realm of other high-end robot vacuums, I might have higher expectations, but for the price point, I think it's a great deal. If you have the capacity to connect this to your water line, it would be a compelling reason to get this bot.
Ecovacs is a well-established name in the robot vacuum space with their Deebot line. This was the first from that line I had tried, and what appealed to me, a lot, was the addition of a stick vacuum to the mix. This seemed to acknowledge the hard truth, which is that no matter how great your robot is, you'll likely still occasionally need a stick as well.
What I found was a mixed bag, particularly with the vacuum, and I'll explain why that was disappointing. Vacuums tend to be judged on how powerful their suction is, measured in pa. For instance, my favorite model, the S8 Max V Ultra, is 10000 pa, which is almost unheard of. The incredibly competent K10+ is only 3000. But the T30S is 11000 pa, which is bonkers. It should be able to be used as a dental cleaning device at that level of suction—but instead it was only pretty good. Pretty good is perfectly acceptable, by the way, but I found it missed larger detritus, which was annoying in the dining room and kitchen, where pieces of food would drop from the counters or leaves would get windswept in from the front door. The stick vac actually worked better on this kind of debris, and I liked having it nearby, but did not like that you had to assemble and dissemble the stick vac to use the self-emptying tower, which is the whole point.
On the contrary, the mop on the T30S was surprisingly great. It uses two spinning mop pads, which is traditionally not my favorite method (I prefer one mop pad). What made these pads so great was how they extended out beyond the robot itself, reaching into corners and against walls.
Usually, these bots share features in the various apps to control them—they all allow scheduling and advanced manipulation of the mapped spaces to allow you to create rooms and zones to customize cleaning. The T30s did all that—but the app itself is flooded with advertising, which does not make using the app a calming experience.
The real oddity (and, I argue, undervalued feature) of this bot was that it navigated through a curtained-off space. When robots moved from bump-and-go to LiDAR, these kinds of room dividers became a problem.( Under LiDAR, robots can't tell a curtain from a physical wall, and would avoid navigating through.) I thought this might be a bug, but Ecovacs confirmed that whether or not it was, it was one they did not intend to address. So if you want a vacuum to sail through a curtained-off area, this is your model.
I've been dying to try a Narwhal, one of the original robot mop companies, for a while. Their Freo Z Ultra is the flagship, and to its credit, the robot was one of the easiest to install, coming out of the box with almost nothing to put together, and pairing with the app easily.
The Freo Z has one roller and two spinning mop pads, which I have often not loved on other robots (I prefer one vibrating pad), but the results were good. The fluffier pads did a decent job of mopping, and the single roller was less apt to get tangled than two rollers together, which many other models have. You can also vacuum and mop at the same time, instead of doing so separately. One downside was that I had to change the water far more frequently than I do on other models.
I have always wondered why robots don't deal with baseboards, since they can get dirty and the robot gets right up next to them. Narwhal intelligently includes a fluffy pad to swipe at them, and while it doesn't wash them, it does get pet hair.
As for the minuses, most robots are now exceptional at mapping your floor plan, and I found the Narwhal to be lacking. It took 20 passes before it bothered going under my couch or around my coffee table, even when I tried to send it to those spots specifically.
Also, sadly, support was lacking. It took five days to get a middling response for why that was happening.
With each new robot offering more and more suction power (some as high as 18000Pa) it's amazing to me that the QRevo MaxV does as spectacular a job as it does with only 7000Pa. It nestles right up to the walls and gets a very respectable edge-to-edge clean, due in no small part to the Flexiarm that extends out from underneath the robot to reach into smaller spaces. It's a hallmark of the most recent Roborocks, and I'm a huge fan.
The QRevo line features two spinning mop pads instead of one singular vibrating pad, and while I still prefer the singular pad, the QRevo's dual brushes do a good job, and extend just enough to get up to the wall, as well.
What's most notable about the QRevo Max V is the consistency. It rarely had to be detangled, which is saying something for a robot vacuum in my home. It never got stuck, and I was able to rely on it to complete a cycle and return home.
The Roborock app is one of the easiest to use, so locating the robot, getting it to the spot you need it, and mapping the house are all easy-peasy. This is a reliable workhorse of a vacuum/mop.
Although you can now purchase a bare-bones robot vacuum for less than $200, the models above represent the flagship, cutting-edge robot vacuums that are on the market and come at a much higher cost. If you're paying over $1000 for a vacuum, it must perform at a level that justifies that cost.
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