If vacuuming is your least favorite chore, employing a robot vacuum can save you time and stress while also making sure your home stays clean. While once most robo-vacs landed on the higher end of the price spectrum, that’s not the case anymore. Sure, you could pick up a $1,000 cleaning behemoth with mopping features, but it would be incorrect to assume that you need to spend that much money to get a good machine.
Now, you can get an autonomous dirt-sucker with serious cleaning chops for $500 — sometimes even $300 or less. But you get what you pay for in this space; don’t expect affordable robot vacuum cleaners to have all of the bells and whistles that premium machines do, like self-emptying capabilities or advanced dirt detection. After testing dozens of robot vacuums at various price points, I’ve narrowed down our top picks for the best budget robot vacuums you can buy right now.
Best budget robot vacuums for 2026
iRobot Best budget robot vacuum overall iRobot Roomba Vac Robot Vacuum Max mode: No | Wi-Fi capabilities: Yes | Object detection: Yes | Charging dock: Yes | Self-emptying dock: No | Mopping capabilities: No | Weight: 6.2lbs Our previous top pick was the Roomba 694, which you can still find (sparingly) at retailers like Amazon. This model has essentially been replaced with a newer, more “essential” version: the $179 Roomba Vac robot vacuum. Not much has changed here, aside from slight design tweaks that make for a more polished silhouette and a larger battery. Otherwise, this new model does everything our previous top pick did and will be the best cheap robot vacuum cleaner for most people thanks to its good cleaning performance and easy-to-use mobile app. Setting up this powerful robot vacuum is straightforward: Open the companion app and follow the instructions. Once it’s connected to your home Wi-Fi network, you’re able to use the app to control the vacuum whenever you don’t feel like using the physical buttons. iRobot’s app is one of the biggest selling points for any Roomba. It’s so easy to use that even someone with no prior experience will be able to quickly master the robot’s basic functions. iRobot’s app puts most pertinent controls on the homepage, so you rarely (if ever) need to navigate through its menu to do things like set a cleaning schedule. We recommend setting cleaning schedules to really get the most out of the device. After all, these are semi-autonomous bots, so why not make it so you rarely have to interact with them? Doing so will ensure the Roomba runs through your home on a regular basis, so you’re always left with clean floors. The only thing I try to do before a cleaning job is get charging cables off of the floor – the Roomba will stop if it sucks something like that up and it’s relatively easy to extract a cable from the machine’s side brushes, but I’d rather not have to do so if I can avoid it. When it comes to battery life, the Roomba Vac will run for up to 120 minutes before it will automatically return to its charging base to power up again. It’s worth noting that the essential family of Roombas includes a combo vac-and-mop machine that you can get for a bit more money. It’s a bit more manual of a machine because you have to refill its water reservoir and attach its washable mopping pad when you want to clean hard floors — but it’ll do so for you, just like it’ll autonomously vacuum all kinds of floors. Just keep in mind that neither of these machines, the standard or the combo, come with a self-emptying base. iRobot has made a name for itself in the autonomous vacuum market for good reason. Its machines are polished, dead simple to use and the accompanying app is excellent. That ease of use (and the reputation of the iRobot name) comes with a slightly higher asking price, which many will be willing to pay. But there are plenty of solid, more affordable options now that didn’t exist even just five years ago. Pros Simple yet attractive design
Good suction power for its size
Easy to use mobile app Cons Cannot fit under low furniture $179 at Amazon
eufy Best budget robot vacuum - runner up Anker Eufy BoostIQ RoboVac 11S Max Max mode: Yes | Wi-Fi capabilities: No | Object detection: Yes | Charging dock: Yes | Self-emptying dock: No | Mopping capabilities: No | Weight: 6.34lbs Anker’s $250 Eufy RoboVac 11S was one of the cheapest vacuums I tested but it also proved to be one of the most versatile. First thing to note: This robot vacuum doesn’t have Wi-Fi, but it does come with a remote that gives you most of the functions and smart features you’d find in an app (including a schedule cleaning feature). Eufy also includes additional brushes and filters in the box. The “S” in this robot’s name stands for slim, and it’s roughly half an inch thinner than all of the other vacuums I tested. Not only does this make the 11S Max lighter, but it was the only one that could clean under my entryway table. This model has a physical on-off toggle on its underside plus one button on its top that you can press to start a cleaning. It always begins in auto mode, which optimizes the cleaning process as it putters around your home, but you can use the remote to select a specific cleaning mode like spot and edge clean. The 11S Max has three power modes — Standard, BoostIQ and Max — and I kept mine on BoostIQ most of the time. It provided enough suction to adequately clean my carpeted floors, missing only a few crumbs or pieces of debris in corners or tight spaces around furniture. The cleaning session lasted for roughly one hour and 15 minutes when in BoostIQ mode and it has remarkable obstacle avoidance. Sure, it bumped into walls and some large pieces of furniture, but it was the only budget vac I tried that consistently avoided my cat’s play tunnel that lives in the middle of our living room floor. As far as noise levels go, you can definitely hear the difference between BoostIQ and Max, but none of the three settings is offensively loud. In fact, I could barely hear the 11S Max when it was on the opposite end of my apartment running in BoostIQ mode. Thankfully, error alert beeps were loud enough to let me know when something went awry, like the machine accidentally getting tripped up by a rogue charging cable (which only happened a couple of times and neither robot nor cable were harmed in the process). Overall, the Eufy RoboVac 11S Max impressed me with its smarts, despite its lack of Wi-Fi. The lack of wireless connectivity is arguably the worst thing about the robot and that’s saying a lot. At this point, though, the 11S Max is a few years old, so you could grab the RoboVac G20 if you want something comparable but a bit newer. We recommend getting the $280 G20 Hybrid if you’re just looking for a Eufy machine with some of the latest technology, but don’t want to spend a ton. It has 2500Pa of suction power, dynamic navigation and Wi-Fi connectivity with support for Alexa and Google Assistant voice commands. Pros Slim design lets it get under low furniture
Good suction power for its size
Long battery life
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