Looking to keep your home clean without having to vacuum and mop every day, pick up dirt, the dinner your child threw on the floor or your furry friend’s endless pet hair? Join the club. Smart home gadgets have come a long way over the years, and that includes robot vacuums. With newer technology including voice controls, object detection and more automation features, investing in a robot vacuum cleaner makes more sense now than ever before. Some of the best robot vacuum cleaners even have mopping capabilities, roller brush options and self-emptying bases, too, and there are plenty that don't cost a fortune either. If you’re ready to adopt a less hands-on approach and let a robot vacuum cleaner do the hard work for you, consider our recommendations below.
Best robot vacuums 2026
Shark Best robot vacuum for most people Shark AI Ultra Voice Control Robot Vacuum with Clean Base Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes | Floor type: All floor types | Features: Obstacle avoidance, home mapping, LiDAR navigation | Assistant support: Alexa/Google Assistant | Mopping capabilities: No | Self-empty: Yes | Good for pet hair: Yes Shark’s AI robot vacuum — of which there are many models with small differences between them — ticks all of the boxes that a mid-range machine should. It offers reliable cleaning performance, its mobile app is easy to use and it produces accurate home maps. On top of that, its auto-empty base is bagless, which means you won’t have to spend money on extra bags every few months. Setting up the Shark is as simple as taking it and its base out of the box, plugging the base in and downloading the companion mobile app to finish things up. The machine connects to Wi-Fi, allowing you to control it via the app when you’re not at home, or using Google Assistant and Alexa voice control. The first journey the Shark makes is an “Explore Run,” during which it produces a map of your home that you can then edit from the mobile app. The Shark produced a pretty accurate floor plan of my home, and I was happy to see a “re-explore” option that I could use if the map wasn’t up to my standards. With a completed map, you’re then asked to label rooms in your home. That way, you can send the Shark to only the bedroom for more direct cleaning jobs, select “no-go” zones and more. The first few times I ran the Shark robot, I had it clean my whole home. It boasts a respectable run time of up to 120 minutes, which will be handy for bigger homes. I was impressed by how quiet it was – or rather, how much quieter it was compared to other robo-vacs I’ve tried. You’ll have to turn up the volume on your TV if it’s cleaning in the same room, but it’ll be hard to hear when it’s sucking up debris down the hallway. It also did a decent job maneuvering its way around the cat toys I left out on the floor. The device’s object detection feature claims it can avoid things as small as four inches, but I found that it was much better at sensing and moving around the three-foot-long cat tunnel on my floor than the many tiny mouse toys. But even if Mr. Mouse caught the edge of the Shark’s wheels now and then, the robo-vac took it all in stride. One thing I look for when testing robot vacuums is how much attention they need from me during cleanings. The best ones are hands-free and require no extra attention at all – once they start a job, they’re smart enough to putter around your home, move around objects and return to their base when they’re finished. With Shark’s robo-vac, I never had to tend to it when it was cleaning. Now, I did my due diligence and picked up pieces of clothing and charging cables off the ground before running the Shark (ditto for every other robot vacuum I tested), so those things were never in the way. Most companion apps will actually remind you to do this before starting a cleaning job. This Shark machine comes with an auto-empty station, so it will dump out the contents of its dustbin after every cleaning run – and also during a job if its bin gets full before it’s done. In the latter situation, the Shark will go back to cleaning automatically after it’s freed up its bin. That’s a great feature, but I found the best thing about the base to be its bagless design. Shark’s device is unlike most other robot vacuum clean bases because you don’t have to keep buying proprietary garbage bags to outfit the interior of the base. When you want to empty the base, part of it snaps off and opens to eject debris, and it easily locks back in place when you return it. Not only is this convenient, but it also brings the lifetime cost of ownership down since you won’t be buying special bags every few months. It’s worth noting that Shark has a couple of models that are similar to this one that just have a different color scheme, a 30- versus 60-day self-cleaning base capacity and other minor differences. The biggest feature that would impact how you use the machine is the clean base capacity: we recommend springing for the 60-day models if you want to interact as little as possible with your robo-vac. Pros Strong suction
Included bagless self-emptying base
Easy to use mobile app Cons Loud while cleaning $448 at Amazon Explore More Buying Options $399 at Walmart
Shark Best robot vacuum and mop Shark PowerDetect NeverTouch Pro Robot Vacuum & Mop Combo Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes | Floor type: All floor types | Features: Auto mopping, obstacle avoidance, home mapping, self-emptying and self-refilling base | Assistant support: Alexa/Google Assistant | Mopping capabilities: Yes | Self-empty: Yes | Good for pet hair: Yes This Shark machine has a mop pad that lives on its underside and will deploy it when cleaning tile, wood and other similar floors. You as the user, during the initial setup process, will indicate in your home map where you have hard floors and when you have carpet. It’s not as automated as some other robot vacuums with mopping capabilities, but it’s just one additional step that you should only have to do one time. When I tested the PowerDetect, I found that it had a very easy setup process (just like all of the other Shark robot vacuums I’ve tried) and it took very little time to putter around the main floor of my house to get an initial home map reading. After that, you can choose if you want the machine to vacuum, mop or do both, in which case it will first vacuum the floors and then mop those freshly cleaned surfaces. Aside from the fact that it took the robo-vac a long time to fill up its tank before mopping (a minute or two longer than I expected), it did a nice job cleaning my mix of hardwood and tile floors. I also never had to untangle it from a messy situation, be it rogue charging cables on the floor or a steep lip on the legs of my coffee table. While I spent most of my time manually dictating cleaning jobs for the PowerDetect, you can set regular cleaning schedules using the modes you prefer, or tell the machine to only clean certain rooms at specific times. Shark didn’t pull the NeverTouch Pro Base’s name out of thin air, either. After initial setup, you really don’t have to touch the base until you need to empty or refill it in some way — empty its debris container or refill its reservoir with water and cleaning solution. Shark claims the base can hold up to 60 days worth of vacuumed debris, which is pretty standard for a machine like this, and it can hold 30 days worth of liquid refill. That means you should be able to run the PowerDetect for at least a month before you have to interact with its base — great for those who hate floor chores, or just don’t have the time to baby a new gadget in their home. If you can handle a bit more manual work, Shark has a few other robovacs that can also mop like the Matrix Plus, which supports sonic mopping, comes with a self-emptying base and costs much less. Pros Good suction and mopping capabilities
Auto-empty and auto-refilling base for vacuum and mopping, respectively Cons Expensive $700 at Amazon
Dyson Best high suction robot vacuum Dyson 360 Vis Nav Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes | Floor type: All floor types | Features: Obstacle avoidance, home mapping | Assistant support: Alexa/Google Assistant | Mopping capabilities: No | Self-empty: No | Good for pet hair: Yes Dyson may have been late to the robo-vac party, but it made a remarkable machine with the 360 Vis Nav. Let’s get this out of the way at the top: this is a $1,000 robot vacuum cleaner that doesn’t have mopping abilities or a self-emptying base. Those factors alone make it less versatile (and more cost prohibitive) than our other top picks, but two of its features make it worth a shout here: its suction power and obstacle avoidance capabilities. The Dyson 360 Vis Nav has the strongest suction power of any robot vacuum I’ve tested; it’s certainly the closest you’ll get to using one of the company’s cordless stick vacs. It sucked up an impressive amount of pet hair from my carpeted floors, and I didn’t even get a “bin full” alert after the fact. Dog hair can be really tricky to pull up from carpets, but it appears this hands-free cleaning machine can handle it all. Obstacle avoidance is impressive as well, thanks in part to the machine’s 360-degree vision system that uses a camera and LED lights to navigate around things like furniture, and map out your home. No robo-vac I’ve used has been able to fully avoid crashing into a chair leg now and again, and the 360 Vis Nav is no exception — but it did so only a couple of times. More importantly, I never got an alert that the robot was stuck or got tangled up with a rogue charging cord and needed human assistance to get it back on track. In many ways, the Dyson 360 Vis NAv distills a robot vacuum down to its essence: it’s really good at sucking up dirt and debris on its own, with little to no interaction with humans needed (after initial setup, of course). Some people will be willing to spend a pretty penny on that — but in a saturated market like that of robot vacuums, you can get a lot more for your money. A self-emptying base and mopping capabilities are all but standard on most robot vacuums priced at $700 or more (and you can increasingly find one, or both of those features on cheaper machines). Personally, I think it’s particularly painful to pay $1,000 and not get a self-emptying base, at minimum. But if you’re willing to spend more on a machine that gets the basics almost perfect, the Dyson 360 Vis Nav is the machine to get. $999 at Dyson Explore More Buying Options $999 at Amazon
iRobot Best robot vacuum for first-time buyers iRobot Roomba Vac Robot Vacuum Wi-Fi connectivity: Yes | Floor type: All floor types | Features: Obstacle avoidance | Assistant support: Alexa/Google Assistant | Mopping capabilities: No | Self-empty: No | Good for pet hair: Yes The iRobot Roomba Vac Robot Vacuum is a good affordable option for most people thanks to its good cleaning power and easy-to-use mobile app. We won’t get too deep into it here since we have a whole guide to cheap robot vacuums with additional recommendations. But suffice to say, the Roomba Vac gives you all the essentials you’d expect from a robot vacuum, along with all of the convenience that comes with iRobot’s mobile app. Pros Simple yet attractive design
Good suction power for its size
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