The Best Robot Vacuums of 2025

Top pick

This bot is a top-notch cleaner and a great navigator that avoids (most) obstacles while keeping on top of scattered debris. It comes with a charging dock that sucks debris from its dustbin after it cleans.

A robot vacuum can be a handy sidekick to a plug-in or cordless stick vacuum, able to handle day-to-day maintenance cleanings. The Roborock Q7 M5+ is a thorough and quiet cleaner with smooth navigation and easily customizable settings. This model also comes with a compact self-emptying dock that automatically empties its dustbin into a bag.

It’s an excellent cleaner. Between its strong suction power, fearless approach to corners and tight spots under and around furniture, and efficient cleaning patterns, the Q7 M5+ is an extremely thorough cleaner.

In our tests, it picked up Cheerios, birdseed, fur, and dust off of hard floors as well as carpets at a first-rate level. It snagged all the Cheerios we placed around the legs of a barstool — a task that foiled a number of other robots we tried — and it missed fewer spots under furniture and near edges than bots that cost double and triple as much.

It’s an efficient and brave navigator. Using a combination of bump sensors and a lidar laser rangefinder, the Q7 M5+ quickly maps your spaces, identifies problem areas, and efficiently navigates with relatively few issues. While more advanced robots approach obstacles and pivot just before contact, this model typically gets as close as possible to a barrier and lightly bumps into it before course correcting, paradoxically allowing for better cleaning coverage around furniture and walls.

No robot vacuum is immune to snags and tangles, but the Q7 M5+ ably avoids problem areas like loose cords or carpet tassels, and it rarely required human assistance to complete a run in our tests.

It has a great app and useful smart features. Roborock’s app lets you map your home faster and more accurately than those of most other smart bots we tested. It is user-friendly and intuitive, and it can store up to four maps of your home in both 2D and 3D.

The app also lets you turn on spot cleaning (to get rid of isolated spills) and auto-boost mode (for fur-covered carpets, for instance), as well as schedule cleaning sessions. You can fully customize how you want the robot to clean each mapped room, including frequency, how thoroughly you’d like it to vacuum, and which of its five cleaning modes (Quiet, Balanced, Turbo, Max, Max+) you’d like it to use.

Compatible with Siri, Alexa, and Google Home, Roborock’s app generally responds well to voice commands — as long as you pronounce Roborock like “Robo Rock,” a common complaint among users. For example, you can say “Hey Alexa, send Robo Rock to vacuum the dining room,” and off it goes.

It has a long run time — and it cleans quietly. The Q7 M5+’s battery lasts for about 180 minutes when used on bare floors in Quiet mode. If the Q7 M5+ encounters the resistance of carpets and is run on Turbo or Max mode, its run time will reduce significantly but still be enough to vacuum a 1,500-square-foot home. It goes about its cleaning at an inoffensive noise level, though Turbo and Max modes are louder.

It comes with a self-emptying dock. The Q7 M5+ empties debris into a 2.7-liter bag in a compact dock, which is a fairly cacophonous process compared with the bot’s noise level while cleaning.

According to the company, the bag typically needs to be changed every six or seven weeks. This eliminates the hassle of manually emptying a bin after every cleaning session or two, and is potentially less irritating for allergy sufferers.

If you don’t want a dock, the Roborock Q7 M5 is the dockless version of our pick and should perform similarly. But then you will need to empty the bin manually after every other cleaning session or so.

It has an (easy to ignore) mopping component. The Q7 M5+ has very basic mopping functionality, which works just fine. This may rankle if you don’t want to deal with water or another part that could break. But the machine is packaged without its mop pads installed, and you don’t have to use its mop function if you don’t want to.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

It misses spots. Most robot vacuums are prone to missing debris in certain situations, and the Q7 M5+ is no exception. When it was between surfaces — say, one wheel on carpet and another on hard floor — it missed some debris. And though it was more eager to get into tight places than many other robots, it still missed a spot here and there in our tests.

Also, it has only one side brush, which means dust pickup near baseboards and edges can be an issue.

Roborock’s customer service appears inconsistent. In our research, we found an alarming number of Amazon reviews reporting frustration about Roborock’s customer service. When we called their helpline, however, our call was promptly answered. We were put on a five-minute hold while a courteous representative researched our dilemma.

It offers an industry-standard one-year warranty but few replacement parts. Although users can replace their Q7 M5+’s washable filters, brush, charging cable, and dustbin, Roborock doesn’t offer replacement motors. And while this model’s batteries can be replaced, the company advises to call customer service first.