IRobot’s $279 Roomba 694 is a great option for most people thanks to its good cleaning power and easy-to-use mobile app. We won’t get too deep into it here since we have a whole guide to affordable robot vacuums with additional recommendations. But suffice to say, the 694 gives you all the essentials you’d expect from a robot vacuum, along with all of the convenience that comes with iRobot’s mobile app. Even this $1,000 robot vacuum bumped into a few table legs while cleaning, but it was noticeably better than other machines at navigating around my furniture and correcting itself when it got stuck. It also moves faster than the j7, so it was able to cover a bit more of my apartment before it had to return to the base for charging after about one hour of cleaning.
That means it doesn’t miss many spots or waste much time recleaning the same areas, as our budget picks, or other low-end models that navigate semi-randomly, usually do. And it doesn’t get stuck on obstacles like thresholds or power cables often. The dust- and crumb-pickup stress tests are meant only to give us an idea of each bot’s cleaning power—they don’t tell the whole story, and we don’t place much weight on them when we’re deciding which models to recommend. We’ve found that as long as a robot has a brush roll and a side brush, it’ll pick up crumbs, tufts of pet hair, and other common debris from bare floors and low-pile rugs.
(A lot of bots come with a little cutting tool to help with this.) The silicone brushes are able to shake off the hair better, making them good for households with lots of pet hair. The budget-priced Deebot U2 Pro is a beast of a bot with a big battery and huge dustbin, making it a good option for households with pets. It also comes with a special pet hair-specific roller brush and a mop attachment.
This year, they released a new Combo j7+, which is a combination vacuum and mop model; we have reached out for a review unit. We also note whether the robot cleans in a random or methodical pattern. Many of the latest models feature a Light Detection and Ranging laser (the same technology self-driving cars use) to map your dyson robot vacuum home and plan an efficient cleaning route. But some affordable robot vacuums still haphazardly ping-pong from wall to wall, inefficiently crossing over the same space multiple times as they clean. The Wyze Robot Vacuum’s low price and competitive feature set make it a nice option for first-time robot vacuum buyers.
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 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.
Rachel Cericola is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter who has been covering smart-home technology since the days of X10. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Men’s Health, USA Today, and others. She hopes her neighbors read this bio because it would explain why she always has four video doorbells running simultaneously outside her home. Wipe the sensors clean as needed, according to the manufacturer’s guidelines—usually with a microfiber cloth or cotton swab with a little water or rubbing alcohol. We keep finding deals on bots from no-name brands like Amarey, Coredy, Goovi, and Onson, all of which present product dimensions that are barely distinguishable from those of the Eufy RoboVac 11S and similar Eufy models we recommend. Eufy RoboVac models are not meant to be dismantled and put back together—doing major repairs is impossible without breaking parts of the robot.
Now, I did my due diligence and picked up pieces of clothing and charging cables off the ground before running the Shark , so those things were never in the way. Most companion apps will actually remind you to do this before starting a cleaning job. Some do, including a version of our top pick, the iRobot Roomba i3+ EVO, and our also-great pick, the Roborock Q5+.
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 shark cordless 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.