This is one of the most reliable, nicest-looking auto-empty docks I’ve tested. The design is compact with some welcome aesthetic touches, such as ribbed matte black plastic casing and a leather pull tab to access the bin area, so it doesn’t look too alien in your home. Some of the more advanced robots have devised ways to prevent getting stuck on common robot traps such as cables and socks. And a few can even identify when your precious pet made a whoopsie and avoid smearing it all over your rug.
To help you understand the different features of each Roomba, Select reached out to Jason Williams, senior corporate communications specialist at iRobot, to find out what factors are most important to consider when buying one. To test that out, I took the Roomba Combo J7 Plus home, where I have a mix of carpets and hardwood floors. It did a great job of identifying carpeted areas during its initial mapping run — from there, I never caught it vacuuming those carpeted areas without lifting the mop up and out of the way first. It’s just a better, more high-end approach to automated mopping, and one you won’t need to think about quite as much.
It’s a particularly compelling option if you suffer from allergies, because it also uses a high-efficiency filter to capture allergens as it cleans. This is an app-controlled vacuum with a low profile that didn’t perform well enough in our testing to compete with others in the same price range. It can be controlled via a remote, app or voice assistant but has no mapping or room-specific scheduling capability, and the random navigation, in our testing, never quite completed a run of the house. More advanced models require you to set up a map and define the zones of your house you’ll want them to clean or stay away from, and even the best vacuum can get stuck and need human intervention. If you’re pressed for time or have a pet who sheds, a good robot vacuum is a worthwhile investment. Reflects the average time it took the robotic vacuum on its max-clean setting to clean our greater than 600 square foot test room over 3 test runs.
Beyond offering greater convenience than traditional models, they significantly limit your exposure to dust, a big plus if you suffer from allergies. As recently as a couple of years ago, it was difficult to find a sub-$1,000 self-emptying robot vacuum, but the price of these models has been decreasing. Its battery life is just okay, but the RoboVac G30 smartly navigates your home, cleaning in orderly lines instead of randomly ping-ponging from wall to wall like some other affordable models. The RoboVac G30 offers a lot of power for its size, and it automatically increases the suction when it moves over carpets and heavily soiled areas. It also features a self-emptying dustbin, good battery life, impressive obstacle avoidance, and strong vacuum suction power. Plus, customizable Keep Out Zones and Clean Zones allow you to tell it the exact area to avoid and clean.
Its companion app is very easy to use and lets you set up virtual boundary lines that it won’t cross or direct it to clean a specific room in your home. It delivers exceptional performance on bare surfaces like hardwood or tile floors and is remarkably effective when dealing with pet hair, though it struggles a little on carpet. It’s also fully compatible with a self-emptying station, though buying the vacuum with this accessory does push it into a noticeably higher price bracket.
It’s an optional feature, not on by default, and is livestream only — there’s no recording. With the same battery as its more expensive S7 sibling that can run for 200 minutes and a huge 640ml bin, the E4 is a workhorse. It’s also very nimble, cleans in methodical rows, and works with Google Home and Alexa voice assistants. Introduced in September 2002, the first-generation Roomba had three buttons for room size.
She has also written tech articles for The New York Times, Wired, and Men’s Health, among others.
Instead, it uses gyroscopic navigation to divide the space into individual areas and clean each one methodically. Watching it go to work as it moves up shark cordless and down in neat, rectangular boxes is quite soothing. The Shark has both clean zones and keep-out zones — neither of which the Roomba i3 Plus Evo has.
We’ve also tested some cheap bump bots that are slightly different from the standard-issue Eufy, including the Eureka Groove. That bot was basically fine, but it couldn’t match the agility of the Eufy model or the durability of the Roomba bots we’ve tested. We bought one of the Goovi models, and lo and behold, we found that it was functionally identical to the 11S, with many of the same components and even the same beep and boop sounds. The Roborock app has a lot more features and control options than iRobot’s app for the Roomba i3 EVO. We’ve aimed to recommend a handful of robots that should work well in most homes and aren’t wildly expensive.