Vacuum cleaners along with floor and carpet cleaning solutions make quick work of cleaning up small and large messes. There’s no time like the present to figure out which type is right for you and your budget – and then get shopping. Using the real thing sourced from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, our expert grinds it into the carpet to create a worst-case scenario before putting each vacuum to work. If you frequently use handheld vacuums to tackle small areas of debris on your carpet or kitchen floor, then they’ll take the pressure off your back too. However, during review we challenged it a bit too far with a red sauce spill and flour on hard flooring which it didn’t cope well with. It’s also really, really loud when emptying and although the suction was pretty mega, our reviewer felt that the L10s Ultra is better suited to the hard floors since not all crumbs were lifted from deep-pile rugs.
Like many robot vacuums at this price, the Roomba i3 EVO can thoroughly clean big spaces by following a (mostly) logical, orderly path throughout a home. To do so, the i3 EVO uses floor sensors, bump sensors, gyroscopes, and infrared (to communicate with the home base). That means it doesn’t miss many spots or waste much time recleaning the same areas, as our budget picks, or other low-end models that navigate semi-randomly, usually do. And it doesn’t get stuck on obstacles like thresholds or power cables often. Instead of laser navigation, the j7+ uses a camera, and the iRobot app has excellent mapping features.
This differs from your regular charging base in that your robot vacuum can empty the contents of its dustbin automatically, to be stored within a dust bag contained in the base. This gives your robot vacuum a new level of independence, because it no longer requires your assistance to continue cleaning. Should the on-board dustbin shark cordless reach capacity, the robot vacuum can empty itself via its base and then continue on route. Of course, the dust bag will eventually need changing within the base, but these will often last for several weeks at a time. Robot vacuums are recommended more for light, everyday cleaning, rather than for handling really embedded debris.
If object avoidance was an advertised feature, we tested that by putting a USB cord, sock, and chocolate pudding on the floor, and then we took note of whether it successfully avoided those obstacles. Lastly, not all Roombas are self-emptying, so we rated each one on the ease of emptying the dust bin or included bag. Then, we had our tester assess the overall value based on how well the product performed in all of the tests, in comparison with the price tag and promised features. Though it wasn’t the best at any of the skills in our slate of tests, it was powerful and versatile enough to keep up with the competition at just about every turn. It’s right on par with the top robot vacuums we test on low-pile and midpile carpets, and it outperformed every other cleaner on hardwood floors except for the $1,100 Roomba Combo J7 Plus. Its lidar, laser-aided navigation was sharp and consistent, and right on par with what we’d expect from other top brands that put that technique to work, including Neato and Roborock.
It offers a number of useful smart features, including home mapping for targeted room cleaning and virtual no-go zones. The Eufy X8 Hybrid is part of the company’s newest generation of smart robot vacuums. The Eufy X8 is the company’s best hybrid model, and with the EufyClean app, it creates an accurate map of your home for targeted cleaning bissell crosswave cordless and mopping. You can also monitor the bot’s progress in real-time to see how it’s navigating and cleaning your home. This robot vacuum actually features two separate 2,000 Pa turbines for twice the cleaning power, and in our testing, it provided extremely powerful suction and strong edge cleaning, which pet owners will appreciate.
In fact, iRobot is so confident in the Roomba j7+’s intelligence that it’s introduced the Pet Owner Official Promise (P.O.O.P), whereby iRobot will replace any j7+ that fails to avoid solid pet waste. This robot vacuum is constantly learning with every run too, making it one of the smartest we’ve seen. Until the Roborock S7, most of the hybrid robot vacuums/robot mops we’ve tested have been good, but not great, at either task. The S7 is the first such device we’d actually trust to vacuum and mop without close supervision.
Just be prepared for the louder operation of this vacuum, especially when it empties, which may be hard to talk over or disturb your sleeping pup or cat on the couch. While the vacuum is running, its built-in HEPA filter traps allergens and fine particles so they don’t escape into your home. Plus, once it’s completed a task, the Samsung Jet Bot automatically dispenses all the debris it picked up into the cleaning station, so you don’t have to remember to empty it after every cleaning run. IRobot advises that you should replace your self-emptying bag when a solid red LED lights up on the base of your robot’s dirt disposal.
Even setting aside the smart maps, the Roborock Q5 is still one of the best navigators we’ve tested. It rarely misses any accessible areas of a home, as random-navigation robots (including our budget picks) sometimes do. In our tests, even when it did bump into an object its lidar turret didn’t detect, it course-corrected more quickly and more accurately than other bots. The Roomba i3 EVO is a better cleaner than most robot vacuums—at any price. We know this from assessing the visual results in our tests, but also from weighing the contents of the robot’s dustbin after vacuuming sessions and comparing that against the performance of other vacs.
It has a number of other features, such as the ability to map multiple floors and create virtual walls. The Roomba i7+ is also fast, finishing a cleaning run in less than 20 minutes. Now that iRobot has released the Roomba s9+, the Roomba i7+ has come down a bit in price, but it’s still just as effective at cleaning. For other options, check out our expert picks for the best Roborock robot vacuum, best robot mops, and best robot vacuum and mop combos. This best vacuum robot has the widest cleaning path with 40x the suction power and a built-in mop to tackle even the toughest messes.
On hard floors, this robot vacuum struggled a bit to suck up the cereal pieces we’d strewn across the ground, but it had no trouble collecting smaller particles. Our tester specifically noted how easy and straightforward this vacuum was to use, especially when compared to some of the high-tech robot vacuums he’d already tested. Additionally, we challenged each vacuum by creating a small obstacle course of furniture for it to navigate, placing socks and USB cables in its path to see if it avoided the objects or ran them over.