It’s really up to you, but the advantage of a robot vacuum is that it can clean floors more often than many people are willing to vacuum. If you schedule it to run every few days, or even every day, dust and crumbs never have a chance to accumulate, leaving your floors feeling cleaner than they would without a bot. In most homes, a bot is likely to stay in good shape if you do about 15 minutes of maintenance per month, maybe a bit more if the bot has a heavy workload. In December 2022, an MIT Technology Review article revealed that images captured by cameras on development models of iRobot Roomba vacuums were leaked publicly by a third-party company, Scale AI, with whom iRobot had shared the data. Another surprisingly useful upside to the basic Eufy bots is their short body. At 2.85 inches, the 11S is almost a full inch shorter than the Roomba 694, enough for it to glide under even lower-clearance furniture, where dust and hair build up but never see the light of day.
Introduced in September 2002,[1] they have a set of sensors that enable them to navigate the floor area of a home. These sensors can detect the presence of obstacles, particularly dirty spots on the floor, and steep drops (e.g., to avoid falling down stairs). For a more budget-friendly option, pet owners should consider the Roomba e5 with Wi-Fi. Robot vacuums can offer a very impressive clean, even on thick carpets, making them an excellent alternative to upright or other vacuums. They’ll be more convenient too as you can set them to work when you’re busy doing other things. In addition, the dust cups on robot vacuums are often smaller than you’d expect to find on a canister or an upright vacuum cleaner.
None of the rooms have any wall-to-wall carpet, but the space does have several area rugs, with styles ranging from lightweight doormats to rubber-backed, medium-pile rugs that take up half a room. The test house also has cats, kids, and other family members, all of whom leave plenty for each robot to pick up. The key is that bots don’t procrastinate or get bored, so they spend more time cleaning, and they clean more thoroughly, than almost any human. Pet owners and people with young kids in particular seem to gain a lot from bots, but many robot vacuum owners have told us that they are amazed at how clean their floors look and feel after they start using one regularly.
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. Then there are the top-of-the-line Roomba s9 and self-emptying Roomba s9+, which we do not recommend. Instead of the classic puck shape, the s9 has a D-shaped body and extra-wide brushes intended to improve its edge-cleaning and corner-cleaning abilities. It also has four times more raw suction than the already-strong Roomba i4 EVO, i7, and j7. That helps it consistently pick up larger debris such as cat litter or yard waste better than most robots, though it still doesn’t come close to deep-cleaning dust from a rug like a traditional vacuum does.
The Roomba i3 Evo Plus doesn’t have clean zones or keep-out zones, so if those features are important to you and the j7 Plus is a step too far, the Shark is a good option. Compared to the Roomba i3, the Eufy has fewer features, lacks mapping and room-specific cleaning, and doesn’t have the option of an auto-empty dock. But it makes up for that somewhat with a bigger bin and / or the option of a mopping attachment. It’s also cheaper, and it’s smaller and shorter, so it will fit under lower furniture better. The j7 is one of the loudest vacuums I’ve tested (hence the propensity to be silenced by a household member).
The i3 has an attractive woven plastic gray top — a nice change from most of the shiny black plastic you find in this category (a magnet for dust, fingerprints, and scratches). It still gets stuck on common robot traps such as phone charging cables, cat toys, and in my house, the skinny feet of a lounger chair. You do need to tidy up a bit before you set it free, but it does bissell crosswave cordless better with large cables and rug tassels than many other robots. (iRobot has anti-tangle tech that makes the bot reverse course if it starts to get tangled.) This works pretty well for bigger items but, sadly, not phone charging cords. For several hundred dollars less than the j7, the i3 has similar software features, the same suction level, and a slightly smaller battery.
But if you want to program it to turn on every Sunday at 10 a.m., learn how to stop at the top of the stairs, or do any other “tricks,” you’ll want to make sure you choose a robot vacuum that’s loaded with the features you want. Some of our favorite features were smart mapping and the ability to set cleaning schedules from an app. To test the maneuverability of each model, we set up an area with a medium-pile rug, couch, coffee table, and dining table.
It doesn’t clean any better than our top pick, and can’t avoid all obstacles yet. “You’d be surprised at how many types of poop there are,” said Hooman Shahidi, then iRobot’s vice president of product development, in a conversation with Wirecutter. He noted that the company has curated a large learning library of different “shapes and configurations” of pet waste. Most robot vacs with object-recognition rely on an onboard camera, which not only identifies obstacles (such as cords and stray socks), but takes an image of the purported clutter so you can see what was avoided. It’s important that anyone using a camera-equipped robot vacuum understand that the bot may inadvertently record images that many would consider private, such as photos of people, including children, in the home. Those images may be sent to the cloud and shared with third-party companies (such as those that analyze photos), in order to improve the vacuum’s capabilities and features.
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 (expected durability, cleaning power, smart navigation), and the obstacle recognition is almost like a toss-in feature, so it isn’t 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. We’ve tested a handful of its laser-nav bots over the past few years, including the Deebot Ozmo T8 AIVI (a higher-end but otherwise similar version of the N8 and N8 Pro). All of the Ecovacs models we’ve tested worked fine when they were new, but you can usually find a better bot for a lower price.
All Roomba bots, including the i4 EVO, also have a dirt-detection system—another feature you can’t find in other brands’ bots. When a Roomba model senses that it’s passing over an area with a lot of debris, it stops and makes a few passes back and forth to pick up as much as possible. Who would’ve thought that one of the best cheap robot vacuums available is also one of the best for tackling pet hair?