Best robot vacuum 2023: Save on our favourite tested cleaners for carpets, mopping and self-emptying in the Amazon Prime Day sale

Robot vacuum cleaners are no longer the expensive pieces of home cleaning tech they used to be. You can now pick up a reliable robot vacuum cleaner for less than £200, although there are options for you to spend a lot more if you prefer a robot vacuum cleaner with all the bells and whistles.

Robot vacuums do a great job of keeping your carpets clean with the minimum of hassle. They use built-in cameras and a variety of sensors to find their way around your home and will return to base to charge themselves without you having to do anything except occasionally empty the dust collection bin.

On this page, we’ve picked out our favourites, all fully tested by our experts. Immediately below, you can find a quick list with prices and buying links. There’s a buyer’s guide after that if you want to find out more about what to look for. And, finally, below that, short reviews of the robot vacuums themselves, complete with links to our full-length reviews elsewhere on the site.

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Best robot vacuum cleaner: At a glance

• Best value: Eufy RoboVac 15C Max | £136
• Best all-rounder: Eufy RoboVac X8 | £399
• Best for a thorough clean: Dyson 360 Heurist | £998
• Best for pet owners: iRobot Roomba j7 | £499
• Best budget vacuum cleaner and mop: Ecovacs Deebot N10 | £399

How to choose the best robot vacuum cleaner for you

How well do they deal with household obstacles?

All robot vacuums employ bumpers and sensors to help them navigate their way around your home and to prevent them coming to grief by falling down the stairs. But some are more efficient at finding their way around than others.

The cheaper versions run to a random cleaning pattern and bump around your rooms blindly, cleaning as they go. This works up to a point but it can take a while for these types of vacuum to finish cleaning a room and, although they do their best to cover all the floor, they often miss spots here and there.

The more expensive robots employ cameras and advanced laser sensors to map out their surroundings first before tackling each room. This means they can work out the most efficient route before getting started and don’t need to cover the same spot twice, as can happen with robots without these sensors.

Even then, advanced sensors can only go so far. A big problem with robot vacuums is that, no matter how good they are at mapping out their surroundings, they often get beached on low-lying furniture and stuck on stray cables.

The best way to avoid this is to keep your floors clear of such items, but in some cases that isn’t possible, which is where you want a robot that comes with the ability to set virtual no-go zones in the accompanying app. That way you can instruct your robot to avoid the places you don’t want it to go near.

Which robot vacuums give the best cleaning performance?

Although most robot vacuums look the same from the outside, they deliver vastly different levels of cleaning performance. And this is affected by a number of different factors. Probably the most important aspect is brush configuration.

Our favourite robot vacuums have brushes that span the full width of the unit, allowing them to clean right along the edges of your room and into the corners. Alas, these aren’t particularly common and most stick with the popular disc shape, with the main brush situated between the wheels and a couple of less effective spinning brushes in the “corners” of the vacuum to drag dust into the mouth of the vacuum.

Next, you need to consider suction power. Typically expressed in pascals (Pa), this is a measurement of how powerful the motor is inside a robot vacuum. A good number to look for here is around 2,000Pa or above for an effective clean.

Is there anything else I should consider?

• Bin capacity: Robot vacuums need emptying more frequently than a regular vacuum, but there’s still quite a variation in bin capacity from model to model. The largest you’ll see tend to be around 0.7 litres in size, but they can be as small as 0.4 litres. Some models have larger bins built into their base stations that they automatically empty into when charging, but these tend to be very expensive.
• Mop attachments: As robot vacuums become more popular, we’re seeing more manufacturers build in mopping features as a way to set their robots apart. These use a small water reservoir with a cleaning pad attached to the bottom that drags around the floor as the robot makes its way around your room. You’ll still need to use a proper mop to get stubborn stains off, though: a mopping robot is only good for cleaning up light dirt and dust from hard floors.
• Self emptying: Most robot vacuums have small dust collection bins and so need frequent emptying, but some can empty themselves into a larger base-station bin and then continue to clean. These robots tend to be more expensive, though, and the base stations occupy more space in your home.
• Height: One thing robot vacuums are great at is cleaning below low-lying furniture, but some are considerably taller than others so it’s well worth checking out the dimensions before you buy to make sure it will fit where you want it to go.

How we test

We test each robot vacuum cleaner by installing it in a typical domestic setting. The charging station is always placed in the same location, and the robot is given the same basic floorplan to clean, so we can see how elements such as navigation and speed compare between every robot we review. It’s a challenging floor plan that challenges even the smartest robot, with plenty of corners, tight spots, low furniture, surface changes and cable nests.

During testing each robot is connected to Wi-Fi and controlled through the supplied app, where available. We test all the features and functions available, including navigation to a second storey, to ensure robots can handle switching between multiple maps. If a robot has a self-emptying station or comes with a mop attachment, we test those, too.

When it comes to analysing a robot’s cleaning capabilities, we test each robot using measured spillages of rice and flour. We send the robot to perform a spot clean of each spill on both carpet and hard floor, and measure the amount collected each time. This indicates how effective each robot is at gathering these problematic materials, and allows us to compare the results with every robot vacuum cleaner we’ve ever tested.

READ NEXT: The best vacuum cleaners money can buy

The best robot vacuum cleaners to buy in 2023

1. Eufy RoboVac 15C Max: Best-value robot vacuum cleaner

Price when reviewed: £136 | Check price at Amazon

You might not have heard of Eufy, but don’t let that put you off: this superb RoboVac 15C Max is a solid choice if you’ve got £250 to spend.

The Eufy RoboVac 15C Max is the more fully featured version of our previous budget robot vacuum top pick, the RoboVac 30C. It costs a little more – the RoboVac 30C has dropped in price since launch – but the 15C Max provides much more suction power than its predecessors. With 2,000Pa of suction, the 15C Max is very powerful considering its price but despite the extra power, it’s still impressively quiet regardless of which of the three settings you use (it has three cleaning settings: Standard, Boost IQ and Max).

Carpet areas will benefit from some of the more powerful settings, but we found the standard setting to be more than suitable for easy-cleaning hard flooring. Boost IQ adjusts the suction power automatically as the vacuum cleaner transitions between different types of flooring. The RoboVac 15C Max can also run up to 1hr 40mins on a single charge and is compatible with Alexa and Google Assistant for a fully hands-off approach to your daily cleaning.

It’s not quite as feature-rich as some of the other robot vacuum cleaners on this list – it lacks infrared scanning and room-mapping – but for this sort of money, the RoboVac 15C Max barely places a foot wrong.

Read our full Eufy RoboVac 15C Max review

Key specs – Size: 325 x 325 x 72mm; Weight: 2.7kg; Battery life: 1hr 40mins; Charge time: 2-3hrs; Bin capacity: 0.7l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 55dB

2. Eufy RoboVac X8: Best all-rounder

Price when reviewed: £399 | Check price at Currys

A good robot vacuum cleaner needs to be a good all-rounder: effective at picking dust and dirt off your floor but also supported by solid navigation and a good app. The Eufy RoboVac X8 lines up all these elements. It isn’t the best cleaner we’ve ever seen in terms of dealing with serious mess in a spot clean but it is a solid general cleaner, has a brilliant app and is excellent at mapping, which makes it easy to configure and use.

Its cameras and lasers build up a detailed map of your floor as it performs its initial clean. This is then saved by the smartphone app, so you can send the X8 to clean individual rooms and set virtual boundaries to cordon off no-go areas. This simple and intuitive operation, accompanying an affordable and capable robot, makes for a compelling package that’s excellent value for money.

Read our full Eufy RoboVac X8 review for more details

Key specs – Size: 345 x 345 x 98mm; Weight: 3.5kg; Battery life: 3hrs; Charge time: 4-5 hours; Bin capacity: 0.6l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 75dB

3. Dyson 360 Heurist: Best for a thorough clean

Price when reviewed: £998 | Check price at Amazon With twice the suction power of any other robot vacuum cleaner we’ve tested, the Dyson 360 Heurist may be the priciest vacuum on this list, but it’s the only one with a genuine claim to being the only one that could replace your standard upright cleaner. With the Heurist, Dyson has not only improved suction by a claimed 20% but has also introduced an LED lighting ring so the robot can navigate in dark rooms and developed an improved app that gives more control over the robot.

The design hasn’t changed much between generations; it’s still around the same size and shape as the previous model – the 360 Eye – and it even uses the same digital motor as before. Instead, the new Dyson 360 Heurist builds on the things that set Dyson’s last robot apart from the competition – tank tracks for climbing obstacles, a full-width brush bar for close-to-the-edge cleaning and a 360-degree camera for all-around vision. If you want a robot vacuum cleaner with all the perks, look no further.

Read our full Dyson 360 Heurist review

Key specs – Size: 2.3 x 2.4 x 12cm; Weight: 2.51kg; Battery life: 1hr 15mins; Charge time: 2.5hrs; Bin capacity: 0.5l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes

4. Eufy RoboVac 30C: Best budget robot vacuum cleaner

Price when reviewed: £210 | Check price at Amazon

The RoboVac 30C is another solid robot vacuum cleaner for the budget-conscious. It’s circular in shape and has a low profile so it can fit under furniture and clean the carpet under your bed, and it will recharge itself at its base when it runs low on battery power. With up to 100 minutes of cleaning per charge, though, it should be able to cope with even the largest of rooms before having to do that.

Other features include Alexa and Google Assistant support (so you can tell it to go clean via your Echo or Google Home speakers), a companion app so you can control it via your smartphone and a useful remote control that lets you direct operations when your phone isn’t handy.

With 1,500Pa of suction power, the Eufy RoboVac is pretty powerful for the money, and it’s reasonably quiet, too. If you’re looking to dip your toe in the water of automatic vacuum cleaning but don’t want to spend in the region of £500, this is the next best thing.

Read our full Eufy RoboVac 30C review for more details

Key specs – Size: 32.5 x 32.5 x 7.2cm; Weight: 2.7kg; Battery life: 1hr 40mins; Charge time: 3hrs; Bin capacity: 0.6l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 55

5. Ecovacs Deebot N10: Best budget robot vacuum cleaner and mop

Price when reviewed: £399 | Check price at AmazonThe Ecovacs Deebot N10 has plenty going for it. It’s a decent vacuum cleaner that will do a good job of keeping your floor clean, especially if you send it out regularly. This is easy to set up using the Ecovacs app, which is well-featured and simple to operate.

The N10 is also an excellent navigator. Its LiDAR-based mapping makes short work of creating a map of your home, and it can manage multiple floors with little difficulty. It’s gentle around furniture and didn’t become stuck in or around any hazards during testing.

The most disappointing element is the mop, which is a drag-and-wipe affair. You have to fill the reservoir with water, then attach the plate with cloth into the vac’s underside. This is drip-fed clean water as it wipes over your floors; however, it isn’t as thorough as robots that add movement to agitate dirt to remove it.

Read our full Ecovacs Deebot N10 review

Key specs – Size: 35 x 35 x 9.3cm; Weight: 7.36kg; Battery life: 5hrs; Charge time: 3-5hrs; Bin capacity: 0.42l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 65dB

6. iRobot Roomba j7: Best robot vacuum for pet owners

Price when reviewed: £499 | Check price at Amazon One of the annoying things about robot vacuum cleaners is that you generally have to tidy up before you set them off. Encounters with charging cables, stray socks or, if you’re really unfortunate, pet poo, can cause them to get stuck or make more mess than they clean up. There’s not much point in setting an automatic schedule for your robot to clean if you’re prone to leaving stuff on the floor.

However, you don’t need to worry about such things with the iRobot Roomba j7. It won’t tidy away your mess but it will give a wide berth to obstacles that could cause it problems. It still gets nice and close to furniture but won’t be phased by the odd dropped sock.

It’s also a proficient cleaner, with a two-roller system that does a good job of scooping up dirt and dust while avoiding hair tangles. If you want a robot that also empties itself, check out the Roomba j7+, which is the same robot but comes with a charging station that empties the collection bin after every clean.

Key specs – Size: 340 x 340 x 92mm; Weight: 3.3kg; Battery life: 1hr 15mins; Charge time: 2hrs; Bin capacity: 0.25l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 55dB

7. Eufy RoboVac G30 Edge: Best robot vacuum cleaner for use in multiple locations

Price when reviewed: £320 | Check price at Amazon The Eufy G30 Edge sits near the top of Eufy’s more affordable robot vacuum cleaner range. It balances a decent amount of power with 2,000pa of suction and a sensible price.

Some premium features are missing, though. Unlike pricier robots, the G30 Edge doesn’t use LIDAR to scan its surroundings and build up a persistent map of your house. Instead, it creates its internal map from scratch each time it goes out, using basic sensors to detect walls and obstacles.

You can check on its progress from the Eufy app but it doesn’t store its map for future reference. To a certain extent, this makes it easier when moving between the floors of multi-storey houses or using it in more than one house as it doesn’t require any map management.

The navigation is better than the simpler robot vacuums, such as the Eufy RoboVac 15C, making this a valid alternative if that model isn’t available, but the cleaning ability is roughly on a par.

Read our full Eufy RoboVac G30 Edge review

Key specs – Size: 320 x 320 x 70mm; Weight: 2.7kg; Battery life: 1hr 50mins; Charge time: 5-6hrs; Bin capacity: 0.6l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 56dB

8. Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni: Best self-emptying robot vacuum and mop combo

Price when reviewed: £1,499 | Check price at Amazon The Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni is arguably the best-performing combination robot vacuum cleaner and mop we’ve tested, but its talents come at a price. One of these is its size. While the robot itself is a fairly standard configuration, its base station is enormous, measuring 448 x 430 x 578mm (WDH).

There’s a good reason for it, though. Not only does the station charge the robot and empty its collection bin into a bigger and easier-to-empty vacuum bag, but it also fills the mop cartridge with clean water, and washes the mop pads when the robot has finished its work.

Although it’s a good vacuum cleaner, it’s the mopping action that impressed us most. The robot uses two circular mop pads that rotate at 180rpm, which gives the mop more cleaning power than rival robots, most of which simply wipe the floor as they pass.

The Omni X1 might be expensive, but it’s worth considering if you’re looking for a proper cleaner that can really do a good job. Keep an eye out for discounts and vouchers on Amazon, because Ecovacs regularly offers both.

Read our full Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni review

Key specs – Size: 362 x 362 x 104mm; Weight: 4.4kg; Battery life: 4hrs 20mins; Charge time: 6.5hrs; Bin capacity: 0.4l; Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes; Decibel volume: 67dB