We’ve tested nine of the best robot vacuum cleaners for every floor and every home.
The best robot vacuum cleaners give you something invaluable: time. Time not spent cleaning carpets, refreshing rugs or washing wood is time you can spend doing something much more fun, and that’s what these bots bring to your home. Not only do robo-vacs clean on your behalf; some of them even empty and clean themselves when they’re done.
Today’s robotic household helpers are positively packed with cutting-edge tech. The newest models are smaller and more powerful than ever before, with advanced navigation systems to ensure they never miss an inch. Some also have sensors that enable them to skip past discarded socks and increase the suction power when they move from hard floors to carpet pile.
While all the models here are brilliant, they’re not necessarily capable of replacing the best vacuum cleaners completely if like us you have enthusiastically messy kids. And if you have pets, it might be wise to invest in one of the best robot vacuum cleaners for pet hair instead: even a medium-sized dog can shed more hair than a smaller vacuum can handle. However, for everyday cleaning that happens without any effort from you, robot vacuums are brilliant things. Coming home to a clean house is one of the great joys of home tech.
Despite their many joys, the best robot vacuums can be quite pricey – although prices are definitely coming down. So to ensure you get the most cleaning bang for your bucks, we’ve tested eight of the leading models in our own homes to really put them through their paces. We’ve put all their key features to the test – runtime, suction power, mapping and automation capabilities and more – to help you find the best robot vacuum for you and your home.The best robot vacuum 2023: tried and tested
The Roomba Combo J7 Plus has the ability to suck up particles as small as 0.7 microns (which is the P.O.O.P promise) making it ideal for pet owners. It will also actively avoid your furry friends at your command over Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant. Generally, we found that the Combo J7 Plus vacuumed well and mopped much better than most combination models, although we did find that it struggled with some spillages such as oats since it had a tendency to fling those around with the brush attachment.
The app makes the Combo J7 Plus easy and intelligent to use. This is where you can set it up to map your floorplan and set zones, and it continues to learn. You’ll receive notifications of a new cleaning recommendation, when a particular space in the home needs more attention.
Although it is pretty quiet in operation, for the 10-30 seconds that it’s emptying the noise reaches a dizzying height of over 90dB. And there’s no denying that it’s expensive, unless you get it whilst on sale.
Read our full iRobot Roomba Combo J7 plus review
For those seeking a robot vacuum on a budget, the Eufy 11S is worth considering. At a reasonable price and often discounted, you’ll be hard pushed to find anything cheaper on the market.
That’s not to say the affordable price tag means compromising on dust pick-up. On test, it picked up dry oats from a medium-pile carpet and a hard floor with ease, and finer dust made from flour and cookies was also no problem for it on a hard floor – although it wasn’t as good on carpets. It’s slim, too, meaning it has no problems cleaning under furniture with low clearance. However, with a smaller dust bin compared to other models on the market and no app control or integration with voice assistants, there are some compromises to be made for the low price – although that will be music to the ears of those that want a simplistic robot vacuum.
It doesn’t take the same logical path around the home when cleaning as other more expensive Eufy models do. Sometimes it’ll go in straight lines and sometimes seek out the edges of a room, while on occasion, it’ll travel in circles, which means it may take slightly longer to clean the whole room or floor. Also, it wasn’t always that good at moving around objects – low-level things seemed to fox it the most, such as deep-pile rugs, piano pedals, and pet food bowls.
