The Eufy RoboVac 11S and other Eufy bots whose model names begin with a number instead of a letter stand out as some of the quietest robot vacuums we’ve tested. They’re also some of the shortest, so they can fit beneath more pieces of furniture. Like the Roomba 694, the Eufy 11S is semi-random in its navigation, so it’s best for cleaning just a few rooms at a time.
It was also good at tackling debris on our floors, though it’s much more effective at cleaning central areas than it is at getting close to the baseboards. The battery provides up to 300 minutes of runtime on the lowest suction setting. However, despite its D-shaped design, which Neato says is suitable for edges and corners of rooms, we found it struggled to collect all of the debris from the corners and crevices of the baseboards in our home.
We scout reviews for hints about longevity, and we favor bots with easy-to-find replacement parts such as filters and brushes but also batteries, wheels, and transmissions. We also fully disassemble some popular bots to get a sense for the build quality and how straightforward they might be to repair. The laser rangefinder (lidar) method has become the dominant tech (the Roborock Q5 Max uses it) and is excellent at quickly learning a home’s layout. shark cordless We also tested the Ecovacs Deebot T8 AIVI, which failed to avoid any objects. It just informed us in the app, after the session was over and the Nutella was smeared everywhere, that there were many objects on our floor and that we should pick them up. The LG CordZero R9 is a very expensive vacuum with powerful cleaning specs, but owner reviews from Australia, where it had been available for a while at the time of our research, were not favorable.
The best robot vacuum cleaners are brilliant things, because cleaning your floors is one of the more time-consuming and tedious chores – so when your robot’s doing it, you can do something much more fun instead. And some of the very best dyson robot vacuum robo-vacs don’t just clean your home; they clean themselves instead. Although robot vacuums are weaker than traditional vacuums, they can reliably pick up most kinds of floor debris, and they work on most bare floors and carpets.
If you’re annoyed or creeped out by the whole thing, you can either buy a non-connected bot or just never set up your bot’s Wi-Fi—these bots all still clean a house automatically even if you don’t connect them to the internet. Keep in mind that you can’t use interactive mapping features without an internet connection. And if you decide to sell or give away a Wi-Fi robot vacuum, be sure to factory-reset it to remove the Wi-Fi credentials. Wyze is known for selling good-enough and implausibly affordable smart-home gear such as security cameras, locks, and thermostats, in addition to the laser-nav Wyze Robot Vacuum. It has consistently been one of the lowest-priced models of its ilk (around $100 cheaper than the Roborock Q5). The robot itself felt relatively flimsy, but we have no clue what to expect in terms of durability, and our analysis of owner reviews didn’t turn up any unusual complaints.
Emptying the base is just as easy as you might hope, but if for some reason you’d rather clear the smaller container on the Roomba itself, you can do that, too. To identify the best robot vacuums, we put models from big brands such as Shark, Dyson, and Roomba to the test and smaller names, including Eufy and Roborock. We evaluate the dirt pick-up of each model covering fine dust and cookie crumbs, along with larger particles, including cereal, while also looking at whether its pick-up on edges and crevices is as good as on large surface areas. During testing, we found it was best suited to quick daily cleans but struggled to remove the level of larger debris and ground-in dirt the S9 could. That being said, for most people, this robot vacuum will strike the right balance between price and cleaning power.