Like most other robot vacuums that cost more than $350, the s9+ can learn the layout of your home, and you can then use a smartphone app to tell it where and when to clean. While it navigated quite well around the obstacles in our lab tests, a staffer found that it had a few quirks in his own home, like being prone to getting snarled on the edges of rugs. This robot vac uses a 20 V Li-ion battery and is equipped with 1 side brush. 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 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.
In our tests, its data security is quite strong, but its data privacy is middling. In CR’s latest member survey, Samsung robovacs receive a middling predicted reliability rating and a Poor owner satisfaction score. For a dependable, versatile, and affordable cleaner, we prefer a bagless upright, but we have recommendations for other types of vacuums as well. If your bot breaks down outside of the warranty period, you may be able to repair it, particularly if it’s a Roomba model. Don’t chalk up the bot as a total loss until you check to see whether the broken part is available as a replacement.
The Samsung Jet Bot AI+ worked its way around a lot of objects but still managed to knock over a few hockey sticks and a bucket of golf balls. When it avoided obstacles, it often misidentified them in the app—and all of that would be fine, if it cleaned effectively. But it doesn’t work very well on even low-pile carpet and is an absolute no for pet owners. We tested the claim out with a fake turd made from Nutella and oatmeal, and the j7 worked great. The j7 spotted the faux feces from a few feet away and then methodically worked around the mess, never getting closer than about a foot.
“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. Now that you’ve learned the differences among a variety of Roomba models, you may be wondering if you can run two at the same time or if your robot vacuum can work in the dark. Find out the answers to these and other commonly asked robot vacuum FAQs below. Roombas all come equipped with a self-charging feature, so when they are low on battery power, these smart devices will return to their charging stations. Some include a “recharge and resume” feature so that the device can continue cleaning where it left off, but others will have to be reset to cleaning mode.
Another option to consider is the lower-priced Roomba i7+, which has the same cleaning system and Smart Map capabilities as the j7+ but doesn’t have the obstacle-avoidance feature. Consider the size of your home and individual rooms before choosing a robot vacuum and pick one with enough power to handle the area. The robot smoothly cleaned open areas within the confines of a test pen and never touched any of our solid pet waste facsimiles.
The 694 is ideal for smaller areas and will work best in rooms without clutter. An auto-adjust cleaning head helps the unit transition easily between low-pile carpet, medium-pile carpet, hardwood, and bare floors. It can run for up to 90 minutes before automatically recharging, but it will need to be reset before its next run. This pick for the best budget robot vacuum doesn’t come with mapping capabilities, although adaptive navigation keeps it from bumping into furniture or falling down stairs. A quieter runner than others we tested, it might be a great pick for spaces or situations where a not-so-loud robot cleaner is needed.
Battery reliability is a frequently mentioned complaint on customer review websites. Battery replacements from iRobot cost a significant fraction of the purchase price of a new Roomba, though compatible third-party batteries are available at a lower price. The iRobot customer support website offers advice on maximizing battery performance and longevity.
You might not expect sufficient cleaning power from a budget robot vacuum, but that’s precisely what the Anker Eufy RoboVac 25C delivers. Its suction power ability to scour sand from hardwood floors (78.9%) wasn’t too far below that of the Roborock S7. The Eufy RoboVac 25C’s sand performance across low-pile (53.5%) and medium-pile (52.2%) carpets was decent as well.
Another advantage is that the Roomba 694 has two counter-rotating brush rolls, mounted in a suspension system, whereas every other bot at this price has a single brush sitting at a fixed height. The Roomba 694 also has a dirt-detection system, which helps the bot reliably clean the most obvious piles of debris as long as it encounters those piles on its semi-random travels. The biggest difference from our top picks is that the Roomba 600 series doesn’t have smart mapping and navigates semi-randomly rather than following an orderly, predictable path. This was the norm for robot vacuums until a few years ago, and a lot of people were happy with that approach. But as of 2022, smart robots are much more common and affordable—and much better at cleaning large spaces consistently and efficiently.
As a result it took a long 91 minutes to finish its cleaning cycle in our test room. Clean the bearings on the brush roll, caster, and irobot vacuum cleaner side brushes every few weeks. You might need a screwdriver for this job, but many bots let you pop out the parts with no tools.