Unlike many traditional vacuums, most of the robots included here don’t use bags to hold the dust, hair, and other debris they suck up. Instead, they use an easy-to-remove dustbin you can simply eject and empty into the nearest garbage can. The Neabot NoMo N1 Smart Robot Vacuum offers excellent cleaning performance, long battery life, and automatic bin-emptying so you don’t have to come into contact with dust. The relatively affordable Eufy RoboVac G30 robot vacuum has a compact design, strong suction power for its size, and smarter navigation than its predecessors.
We also fully disassembled some popular bots to get a sense for the build quality and how straightforward they might be to repair. If you have thicker rugs, or you just feel like owning a stronger bot, then go ahead and spend a little more on a bot with better brushes or stronger suction. The next important task for a robot vacuum is to cover as much ground as possible, as efficiently as possible. It just informed us in the app, after the session was over and the Nutella smeared everywhere, that there were many objects on our floor and that we should pick them up.
We tested the claim out with a fake turd made from Nutella and oatmeal, and it worked great. The j7 spotted the faux feces from a few feet away , and then methodically worked around it, never getting closer than about a foot. It also did a good job staying away from a power strip, power cord, and USB cable. But it didn’t recognize (or at least didn’t try to avoid) our other obstacles, including toys, a sock, a shoe, and a water bowl. We like this bot for a lot of other important reasons , and the obstacle recognition is almost like a toss-in feature, so it’s not a bad buy. The company has a good history of following through on those kinds of promises, but you should expect the improvements to trickle out over several years, not months.
Happiest with a DualSense controller in her hand, she’s also contributed to GamesRadar, Tom’s Guide and T3 and specializes in gaming hardware and computing. Luckily, the Roomba i6+ can access nooks and crannies, bissell crosswave cordless where irritating allergens can easily accumulate, that a regular vacuum might not be able to. And, any dust bunnies it comes across are rapidly sucked up and trapped inside its AllergenLock bag.
We can’t be sure whether other models will have similar rates of problems, though the typical user ratings for EcoVacs’ laser-nav bots tends to be a few tenths of a point lower than other brands’ ratings. To EcoVacs’ credit, we’ve found that their bots are a little better at traversing tall rugs and large thresholds than other brands’ bots. First, you need to connect the bot to Wi-Fi via your router’s 2.4 GHz frequency only, and like anything Wi-Fi related, some people seem to have trouble getting it to work smoothly on their network. Then, you pair it with a companion app (either Xiaomi Home or Roborock’s own app—their features vary slightly, and we find the latter to be simpler). It’ll take some time to get used to the icons and sub-menus, while the imperfect border-drawing tool means you’ll be doing a little trial and error to get some of your zoned cleaning really dialed in.