The iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner shoulders some of the housework load by automatically cleaning your carpet and floors. It vacuums up debris, even in hard-to-reach spots like beneath your furniture and along baseboards. While robot vacuums don’t have crevice tools that work well down the side of your sofa or stairs, these machines usually have small brushes on the outside of their shells. The brushes do an excellent job of getting close to baseboards and ensuring that any crumbs or dirt on hard floors don’t escape the vacuum’s suction.
However, as with most robot vacuums, you could also set a Schedule to accomplish these tasks. That’s where you’ll connect the vacuum to Wi-Fi so that you can schedule cleanings and unlock support for control by voice commands. The app is also where you can see the map of your apartment the robot is generating with its sensors, and obsessively track how much of your space it’s actually cleaned.
IRobot said it had consent to collect this kind of data from inside homes—but participants say otherwise. The most intimate image we saw was the series of video stills featuring the young woman on the toilet, her face blocked in the lead image but unobscured in the grainy scroll of shots below. In another image, a boy who appears to be eight or nine years old, irobot vacuum cleaner and whose face is clearly visible, is sprawled on his stomach across a hallway floor. A triangular flop of hair spills across his forehead as he stares, with apparent amusement, at the object recording him from just below eye level. Keep in mind that manufacturers typically cover their robots with one-year limited warranties that include parts and labor.
The test house also has cats, kids, and other family members, all of whom leave plenty for each robot to pick up. Also consider the Eufy RoboVac 11S, which is so quiet and nimble that it blends into the background like no other robot (apart from the dozen or so clones from Eufy itself and other brands). This basic, bump-and-run bot sounds more like a desk fan than a vacuum—even if you’re home while it works, you’ll barely notice it running. It’s shorter than most bots, which lets it glide under more furniture, picking up plenty of hidden debris. The big downside is that the RoboVac 11S and other bots like it don’t seem to be built to last for more than a couple of years on average, and we’ve heard about plenty of unrepairable breakdowns that happen even sooner.
“This vacuum is a lifesaver in sucking up dog hair, especially under the bed where it’s hard to reach with a traditional vacuum,” our long-term tester said. The Roomba 694 uses WiFi connectivity and an easy-to-use app on your phone to complete cleaning jobs. You’ll be able to name your vacuum, start a timed cleaning job, locate the vacuum, and tell it to return to the charging station from within the app, allowing you to run the vacuum even when you aren’t at home. Our top choice is the iRobot Roomba 694, which sucks up debris on hardwood floors, carpets, and tile alike. Only the j7+ Roomba works with the company’s subscription service, iRobot Select. It self-empties, can map your home, and pairs with voice assistants.The iRobot Select add-on automatically sends you a refresh of supplies, makes it seamless to swap out bags, filters, and brushes when needed.
It works better on hard floors compared to carpets, but even on carpets the performance was decent, scoring an average of just over 90. It also has niceties such as multi-floor mapping, no-go zones, and scheduling. If you’re looking for a robot vacuum that can also mop, the Roborock S7 is worth a look. IRobot’s Roomba s9+ is one of the smartest and most thorough robot vacuums we’ve tested, which is why irobot vacuum cleaner for us, it’s the best robot vacuum overall. It has advanced mapping, so it can record and remember a blueprint of multiple floors of your house after just a few trips; you can then specify individual rooms, and tell the s9+ to clean specific rooms on specific days. We suggest scheduling it for when you’re out of the house, as this is admittedly a noisy robot vacuum, particularly on hardwood floors.
While the Yeedi Vac Station robot vacuum performed well on carpets and hard floors—it picked up all of the dirt and sand but left some hairs behind—we particularly loved its mopping feature. It was able to successfully wipe away liquid messes, like spilled coffee, without a trace, and though it took a few passes, the vacuum-mop combo also cleaned sticky syrup off the floor. Whether your home has hardwood flooring, tile, carpets, or rugs, it’s convenient when you can find a device that’s versatile enough to clean all surface types in one fell swoop. That’s why we rated the iRobot Roomba 694 as the best overall robot vacuum after testing; this easy-to-use machine effortlessly navigated multiple floor types while collecting dirt and debris with ease. A consistent cleaner on both hard floors and carpet, this app-controlled robot vac is a reliable addition to your cleaning arsenal. It responded to our voice tests every time, and its app was a similarly reliable way to control it.
We found it to be extremely easy to operate, with helpful features that allow it to navigate without assistance around your space. If you have a large home, a complex layout, or you only want your robot vacuum to clean certain rooms at a time, you’ll likely find that vacuums with mapping technology are the best to use. We found that the Ecovacs DeeBot N8+ was the best robot vacuum with mapping, as it easily navigated through our testing lab’s complicated course.