Johnson has boiled down testing insights and brought our experience with low- and high-tech products to life. You can also find her work on Real Simple, Better Homes and Gardens, Apartment Therapy, and Southern Living. Aside from cleaning your floors, Roombas also come with features such as voice control, smart mapping, and scheduled cleans. Our home testers are currently performing long-term tests on our top vacuums to put these smart features through their paces in the real world. We will update this list with their fresh and thorough insights once those tests are complete.
But the Roomba bot can easily pay off in the long run because it’ll last longer. In fact, several Wirecutter staff members have owned Roomba 600-series bots for several years and have found them to be sturdy and reliable. Siri Shortcuts worked a little better in our tests since we could customize the wording of our voice commands, but their overall functionality is limited. For example, you can’t use Siri to set up Automations as you can with Alexa and Google Assistant—though to be fair, Automations on those two platforms are pretty limited, as well. Using Alexa, Rachel was able to create an automated Routine that would tell the Roomba i3 EVO to start vacuuming whenever Rachel and her smartphone left her house.
While the Roomba j7 is the best bot if you want all the bells and whistles, the Roomba i3 Evo is the best pick for a more affordable robot vacuum. There’s no AI obstacle avoidance or app-enabled clean or keep-out zones, but it does have smart mapping (so you can control exactly which rooms it cleans and when) and a physical spot-cleaning button for doing small areas on the fly. It’s almost as powerful as the j7 and just as repairable, so it should last you longer than a cheaper vacuum from dyson robot vacuum another company. We sent a privacy and security questionnaire to the companies that make our picks and compiled the key portions of their responses in the table below. In general, the owner data isn’t that sensitive, and the mapping data is unsophisticated for now. We’re more uneasy about what the companies may do with collected information in the future, such as selling it to third parties; the makers of our current picks don’t sell data for now, but privacy policies are always changing.
Ultimately, though, this set of images represents something bigger than any one individual company’s actions. Just watch the above GIF, which shows what happened when we put the iRobot Roomba J7 Plus to the test — specifically, its promise of identifying and avoiding pet waste. With a variety of (I assure you, fake) dog poop scattered about a small, enclosed test floor, the Roomba did its best to vacuum the area without touching any of them. It succeeded, never bumping into any of our disgusting-looking test turds at all. That makes this highly-versatile floor-cleaner a top value pick, and an easy recommendation for the very top of our list.
This small, practically silent robot is an ideal inexpensive option for a cozy apartment or to use as a second bot for an upstairs space or home office. Currently selling for $180, it lacks smart mapping features, has no smart obstacle avoidance, doesn’t have an auto-empty dock option, and only runs for 90 minutes. Some do, including a version of our top pick, the iRobot Roomba i3+ EVO, and our also-great pick, dyson robot vacuum the Roborock Q5+. Self-emptying robot vacuums come with a big charging dock that sucks debris out of the robot through a trapdoor in the dustbin and stores it in a disposable bag or a bagless bin. You still have to toss the bag or empty the bin regularly, and the charging stations are big, noisy, and kind of ugly, but the system saves you from having to empty the dustbin on the robot every time you vacuum.
Among the myriad companies that have popped up over the past decade, Scale AI has become the market leader. Founded in 2016, it built a business model around contracting with remote workers in less-wealthy nations at cheap project- or task-based rates on Remotasks, its proprietary crowdsourcing platform. With the raw data required for machine-learning algorithms comes the need for labor, and lots of it.