The Best Robot Vacuums, According to the Reviews

Buy the Roborock Qrevo Curv if you want one machine that does everything, and the Saros 20 if the floor is carpet and the house has a pet. The Dyson is the interesting entry: the brand most people associate with vacuums scores lowest of the four that qualified, and two of its three outlets landed on three and a half out of five independently.

That is not a hit piece. Tom’s Guide makes the Dyson its mopping pick and credits the extending roller with lifting dried-on stains in a single pass, which is a real advantage. But the machine is judged on everything else too, and on everything else the reviewers were unimpressed — navigation, app, and a self-emptying dock that did not always empty.

The four, at a glance

	Review consensus	Strongest at	The catch
Roborock Saros 20	9.0 — from 8 to 10	Carpet, pet hair, thresholds	Its outlets disagree by a full two points
Roborock Qrevo Curv	8.7 — from 8 to 9	Nothing in particular, everything adequately	Expensive for an all-rounder
Roborock Q7 M5	7.7 — from 7 to 8	Hard floors, on a budget	Long hair and mopping
Dyson Spot+Scrub Ai	7.3 — from 7 to 8	Dried-on stains, in one pass	Navigation, app, noisy drying cycle

Consensus averages three published scores per machine, normalised to ten. The “strongest at” column is ours, read off what those reviewers found.

Why only four

The roundups we checked name more than a dozen machines between them — TechRadar alone lists eight. Only four had three published scores from named outlets, which is our threshold, so the rest are not here.

That is a fact about the category rather than about the products. Robot vacuums are launched faster than reviewers can test them, in overlapping model families with near-identical names, and a machine can be a roundup pick on the strength of one review. If you have seen a model recommended confidently that is missing from this page, that is usually why.

What the scores cannot tell you, and it is a lot

Everything above comes from reviews that ran for days or a few weeks. The things that actually ruin a robot vacuum arrive over months — brushes that clog on long hair, mop pads that start to smell, a dock that jams, an app that gets worse in an update, a brand that stops issuing firmware. None of that is visible in a launch review, and none of it is in these numbers.

We do not currently gather owner reports in any systematic way, so this page cannot speak to reliability. That is a real limitation of the method and not a small one in this category. It is the next thing we intend to fix.

The most-searched name in this category is in Chapter 11

Which brings us to the machine nobody picked. roomba robot vacuum is a top-five search term here, and Roomba appears in none of the three roundups’ picks. There is a reason larger than test scores.

iRobot filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware on 14 December 2025, and is being taken private by Picea Robotics — described by CNBC as “its primary manufacturer”. The company had warned in March 2025 of substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern, and in October 2025 said the search for a buyer had stalled.

The shape of it, from the reporting on its court filings: about $682 million of revenue in 2024, roughly $190 million of debt from a 2023 refinancing, a thwarted $1.4 billion Amazon buyout, and a 46% US tariff on imports from Vietnam — where it makes the vacuums sold in America — which added $23 million to its costs in 2025.

Why this belongs on a buying page. A robot vacuum is not a kettle. It is a cloud service with brushes: the maps, the app, the scheduling and the firmware all depend on a company still being there to run them. Chapter 11 is a restructuring rather than a liquidation, iRobot has said it expects to keep operating through the process, and the sale is meant to keep the products alive. But it is a live risk that no two-week review prices in, and it is the clearest possible example of the gap described in the section above.

One correction while we are here, because we went looking. A claim circulating in owner communities holds that the US government has banned Roombas. We found no evidence of any import ban on iRobot’s products. What we did find is a request in January 2026 by a bipartisan pair of US lawmakers for a national security review of the transfer of control to a Chinese supplier — a different thing, still worth knowing, and not a ban.

What actually decides it

• Carpet or hard floor? It is the first question and it splits the field. Suction matters on carpet; mopping and edge-cleaning matter on hard floors, and no machine is best at both.
• Do you want a mop or a wet cloth dragged around? The searching says mopping is what people actually want. The machines that do it properly lift or extend the pad; the cheap ones do not, and the difference shows on a dried stain.
• Check the consumables before you buy, not after. Brushes, filters and pads are a running cost, and it is the part of the purchase nobody researches.
• Count your thresholds. A robot that strands itself on a door strip twice a week gets unplugged and never used again, which is the most expensive failure mode there is.

Our smart plug guide covers the other end of this category, and what to do when smart devices keep dropping off is the fix for the complaint that follows almost every robot vacuum purchase.