I think we can probably agree that household chores like ironing, washing, and vacuuming aren’t the most enjoyable. While yes, good cleaning is often necessary and sometimes even therapeutic, it’s often hard to fit into a busy schedule.

A robot vacuum cleaner, however, can make your life easier and even a little more fun. While smart bots have yet to completely replace the traditional vacuum cleaner in terms of cleaning power, their customizable and regular cleaning programs often results in a satisfactory clean and presentable home. In fact, we have one robot vacuum cleaner cleaning upstairs and another doing the kitchen downstairs as we’re writing this. Needless to say, we’re big fans of our robot cleaning friends here at Pocket-lint.

To help you decide which robot vacuum best fits into your lifestyle and effectively tidies your space, we rounded up the best robot vacuums we’ve tested. The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra holds our pick for best robot vacuum overall thanks to its smart features, extensive cleaning capabilities, and even the ability to self-clean. Read on for the rest of our picks, including a best value option, compare.

Our picks for the best Robot Vacuums

The Roborock S8 Pro Ultra is a premium robot vacuum cleaner with masses of cleaning features that make it a joy to have in your home. It’s not cheap, but for your money it does it all – vacuums, mops, self-empties, cleans, and even dries its own mop. This robot vacuum also cleverly maps out your space and avoids shoes or other scattered items without you having to re-program anything or conduct an inventory of your space before sending the robot off to clean.

The S8 Pro Ultra robot vacuum cleaner also has some serious suction power, so much so that it was sucking up everything in sight. It does have some problems with thick rugs, but if you have hard flooring or hard-wearing carpets, then it’s a great one to buy. The only thing we would say is that it’s not the most compact of the options on our list – nor the best looking – so if you have minimal space, you might want to consider one of our other best robot vacuum cleaner options.

The iRobot Roomba Combo J7+ is an exceptional robot vacuum cleaner and robot mop duo. During our testing, we loved that it not only brought a lovely compact and premium design to our kitchen, but did so without compromising excellent cleaning abilities and simultaneous, yet powerful ability to vacuum and mop.

Note however, that you can’t choose to only mop, though you can choose to only vacuum, which is helpful when you just need a quick clean. The machine self-empties when the bin gets full, and while it doesn’t clean and dry its own mop like the Roborock option above, you can pop the mop element into the washing machine.

Smart mapping is excellent on this robot vacuum cleaner, allowing you to name all the rooms in your home and create virtual dividers. Working with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, too so you can also utilize voice control. With an app interface that is so simple and easy to use and a multitude of features on board, it makes this two-in-one device an easy recommendation.

If you’re looking for convenience without compromising power, the Roborock S7 MaxV Ultra is the dual smart combo for you. Purchased with its accompanying self-emptying dock, this robot vacuum cleaner will not only vacuum (and mop) your home, but will also empty and clean itself when it’s finished.

The huge dock not only works to charge the bot, but also to empty its dustbin, wash its mop and prepare it for the next cleaning session. This makes automated cleaning even more convenient and pleasant. With superb cleaning capabilities, excellent obstacle avoidance skills and much more besides, the S7 MaxV Ultra is well worth a look.

The iRobot Roomba J7+ is a premium robot vacuum cleaner from perhaps the most well-known name in the business. As you’d expect, that means you get a range of features including automatic dirt disposal, intelligent home mapping and a whole host of other clever features, like compatibility with both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.

Its smart mapping feature will create a map of your home that you can then label how you want and add virtual room dividers so you can fine tune exactly what you want cleaned and when. Perhaps one of our favourite things about the iRobot J7+ though was just how great it looks. With a compact design, it slides neatly under the bench in our kitchen, so you don’t have to think about it (or cleaning) when it’s not actively functioning. Additionally, we found this bot delivered excellent cleaning performance, especially thanks to its front camera that accurately detects obstacles rather than chewing up your socks and cables, or worse, running pet waste through your home.

The Dyson 360 Heurist is a distinctly Dyson device through and through. It immediately strikes thanks to a big, bold, blue design, powerful suction and impressive smarts too. This robot’s cameras and sensors allow it to easily navigate around the home while it cleans and it’s supported by a powerful and detailed app that includes plenty of functionality.

The Dyson 360 Heurist is taller than other bots due to the inclusion of Dyson’s Radial Root Cyclone technology. This means it can’t slip easily under furniture, but it has some seriously impressive suction capabilities, so it can be forgiven for not being able to sweep away those chocolate crumbs under your sofa like others on our best robot vacuum cleaner choices can.

How did we pick these best robot vacuum cleaners?

Over the past decade, the Pocket-lint team has used a range of robot vacuum cleaners actively seeing how much they’ve developed — evaluating them not only for their nuance, but practicality and effectiveness. When we first started testing robot vacuum cleaners, you needed an already spotless environment to avoid the machine running into obstacles and causing counterproductive mess. Luckily, that’s no longer the case, and robot vacuum cleaners these days are no longer just black, plastic boxes, but they self-empty, some will mop too and some have some great designs. We picked a range of the best robot vacuum cleaners we have tested for various use cases, picking some for their cleaning performance, others for their extensive features, some for a design as unobtrusive as their cleaning promise.

What should you consider when buying a robot vacuum cleaner?

There are a couple of things you should consider if you are planning to buy a robot vacuum cleaner.

• Obstacle detection and clutter: First up, while some options like the iRobot Roomba J7+ and iRobot Roomba Combo J7+ – as well as the Roborock options – have a camera on board for obstacle detection, robot vacuum cleaners work a lot better if your home isn’t full of clutter. If you have things everywhere, there’s a good chance you will schedule your robot to do a clean when you go out to work or to the shop, only to come home and find it has got stuck on something you left in the middle of the floor.
• Floor levels: It’s also worth considering how many levels your home is on. All the robot vacuum cleaners we have added to this list can handle small steps – around an inch – but if you ask for more than that, you will likely find they won’t cope.
• Mop combos: Finally, consider whether you want just a robot vacuum cleaner, or one that can mop too. We love our combo device downstairs, while upstairs we have just a robot vacuum cleaner rather than a combo device as we mainly have carpet upstairs. You’ll pay less for a vacuum only, but the combination devices are particularly useful in some cases.