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The iRobot Roomba i7+, S9+, and 694 on carpet. Credit: Reviewed / Jonathan Chan

The Best Roombas of 2023

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The iRobot Roomba i7+, S9+, and 694 on carpet. Credit: Reviewed / Jonathan Chan

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Editor's Choice Product image of iRobot Roomba j7+
Best Overall

iRobot Roomba j7+

The iRobot Roomba j7+ boasts excellent navigation, forward-thinking smart features, and good cleaning performance. Read More

Pros

  • Excellent navigation
  • Easy storage
  • Good cleaning performance

Cons

  • Loud
2
Editor's Choice Product image of iRobot Roomba i3+
Best Value

iRobot Roomba i3+

The i3+ is a more affordable version of our favorite robot vacuum, the Roomba i7+. It has powerful suction, but lacks some of the higher-end smart features. Read More

Pros

  • Powerful suction
  • Self-emptying

Cons

  • Expensive, even as a best value
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Editor's Choice Product image of iRobot Roomba i7+

iRobot Roomba i7+

Not only can the iRobot Roomba i7+ robot vacuum empty itself, but it also has powerful suction. Read More

Pros

  • Can empty itself
  • App allows you to choose what rooms to clean
  • Powerful dirt pickup

Cons

  • Expensive
4
Product image of iRobot Roomba i6+ (6550)

iRobot Roomba i6+ (6550)

The iRobot Roomba i6+ is an Amazon-exclusive robot vacuum that has the same performance as the i7+, but with fewer spare parts. Read More

Pros

  • Power suction
  • Self Emptying
  • Comprehensive App

Cons

  • Expensive
5
Product image of iRobot Roomba 694

iRobot Roomba 694

The Roomba 694 boasts incredible pickup performance as well as simple controls. But it can get pretty rammy. Read More

Pros

  • Affordable
  • Good Cleaning

Cons

  • Loud

The 6 Best Roombas of 2022 When it comes to robot vacuums, iRobot is the juggernaut, accounting for roughly half of the automated floor cleaners on the market. Based on our lab testing, the convenience and quality that iRobot's Roomba robot vacs offer justifies their dominance. That’s why they also dominate our vacuum buying guides, from picking up pet hair to robot vacuum in general.

However, the best Roombas also run the gamut from affordable to really expensive, so it can be difficult to figure out which one is right for cleaning your floors.

We lab tested a ton of Roombas on their cleaning ability, navigation system performance, value, smart features, and ease of usability. After balancing those test scores out, we think the iRobot Roomba j7+ (available at Amazon for $549.00) is the best choice for most households.

Here are the best Roombas you can buy:

The forward-facing camera of the iRobot Roomba j7+ with its light on
Credit: Reviewed / Jonathan Chan

We found the light that helps the j7+ navigate to be intrusive at times.

Best Overall
iRobot Roomba j7+

The iRobot Roomba j7+ is a massive upgrade in performance, aesthetic, and new features. It’s our favorite Roomba ever, and our favorite robot vacuum overall.

A combination of forward-facing cameras, machine learning, and powerful suction help it grab 9.35 grams of dirt per run. That’s not the highest count of any robot vac we’ve tested, but it’s still enough that a week of running it can compete with a cleaning from a full-sized vacuum. It’s great at obstacle avoidance. It won’t bonk furniture and can even avoid pet waste, so it won’t make new messes as it cleans up the old ones.

The iRobot Genius app lets you mark areas and schedule spot cleanings or regular runs. Beyond managing the daily cleaning schedule, you can set it to clean your kitchen table after dinner or vacuum the entry when your kids come home from school.

This Roomba’s charging dock vacuums out the dust into a self-sealing bag, so you don’t have to handle anything it picks up. It’s also a giant improvement aesthetically. The self-emptying base is more likely to fit in with your home decor, and the robot itself has a brushed metal top that will keep looking spick and span for years to come.

As a robot and as a vacuum, the iRoomba j7+ represents a huge leap forward.

Pros

  • Excellent navigation

  • Easy storage

  • Good cleaning performance

Cons

  • Loud

The iRobot Roomba i3+ sitting in front of a gray background.
Credit: Reviewed / Jonathan Chan

The textured top of the iRobot Roomba i3+ keeps it looking fresh even after plowing through dust bunnies.

Best Value
iRobot Roomba i3+

The iRobot Roomba i3+ provides the best bang for your buck. It’s the most affordable Roomba model you can get that has the self-emptying feature.

During our cleaning tests, the i3+ picked up an average of 11 grams of dirt per run. This puts it in the same league as the more expensive i7+. We also think the textured, gray top of the i3+ is a better design than the i7+. After a few weeks of cleaning, the i3+ looks much cleaner and less scuffed, whereas right out of the box, the i7+ and i6+ look very shiny and attractive, but over time they tend to get scratched and covered in dust.

People who are on the fence between splurging on the i7+ or looking to save with i3+ should know there are a few drawbacks to the latter. It comes with less stuff. The i7+ comes with five extra dirt disposal bags and an extra side brush.

Pros

  • Powerful suction

  • Self-emptying

Cons

  • Expensive, even as a best value


Other Roombas We Tested

Product image of iRobot Roomba i7+
iRobot Roomba i7+

The iRobot Roomba i7+ offers strong suction and pioneered Roomba’s self-emptying technology. All you have to do is empty the self-sealing bag every now and then. Suction in the charging base takes care of the rest.

The i7+ also has a whole host of convenient smart features. While not as customizable as its successor, the j7+, it’s still a smart vacuum. Its virtual maps track cleaning cycles and you can mark certain rooms as off-limits. You can also give commands through Alexaand Google Home. Plus, while its tech may not match up the new model, it actually has a little more suction power. In test runs, it averaged 10 grams of debris, a little more than our top pick.

It may have been dethroned as the best, but the i7+ is still a great Roomba, loaded with smart features and powerful cleaning performance.

Pros

  • Can empty itself

  • App allows you to choose what rooms to clean

  • Powerful dirt pickup

Cons

  • Expensive

Product image of iRobot Roomba i6+ (6550)
iRobot Roomba i6+ (6550)

The iRobot Roomba i6+ and i8+ are retailer specific versions of the i7+, sold at Amazon and Costco respectively. They are more or less clones of the i7+, which means everything from dirt and debris pickup performance to the installation are all the same.

The key difference is that the Roomba i6+ lacks a spare filter and extra bags.

The Roomba i8+ has larger battery life and comes with a virtual wall, which is a device that fires an infrared beam that the robot will not cross. Both these features are somewhat redundant, since we found during testing that the Roomba i7+ can already cover most homes in a single charge and the Genius Home Intelligence app can direct where you want your robot vacuum to go.

Both the i6+ and the i8+ are fine, especially if you are already an Amazon Prime or Costco member. However, we don’t see a major advantage in buying them over the i7+ unless they’re on sale.

Pros

  • Power suction

  • Self Emptying

  • Comprehensive App

Cons

  • Expensive

Product image of iRobot Roomba 694
iRobot Roomba 694

If you’re looking for affordability, the iRobot Roomba 694 is your best bet. With less of its battery power devoted to fancy features, it offers powerful cleaning performance, averaging 11 grams of dirt in our test runs.

Unfortunately, that does mean that the navigation isn’t as strong. It has a tendency to ram into furniture. It never damaged any of our testing furniture, but it wasn’t quiet or subtle, either.

The 694 is compatible with iRobot Genius, but you won’t really need it for this simple robot vacuum. You can just plug it in and let it do its thing.

Pros

  • Affordable

  • Good Cleaning

Cons

  • Loud

Product image of iRobot Roomba S9+
iRobot Roomba S9+

The iRobot Roomba S9+ is unique amongst iRobot robot vacuums with D-shaped chassis—a style pioneered by Neato. The idea of a D-shape is that it can get flush with walls and corners, something that circular robot vacuums can have trouble doing. After spending a week with the S9+, we think that it’s a fine robot vacuum, but it’s too expensive for what you get.

In our cleaning tests, this robot vacuum picked up an average of eight grams per run, slightly lower than our standard of 10 grams.

The S9+ is gentle, only lightly nudging furniture and walls to find its way around. This behavior can be great, but it also means the S9+ avoids jamming its brushes into places to find dirt and debris.

Pros

  • Powerful

  • Self-emptying

Cons

  • Expensive


How We Test The Best Roombas

The Tester

Hey, I'm Jon Chan, the Senior Manager of Lab Operations at Reviewed. If you clean with it—whether it’s laundry detergent or dishwashers—I oversee its testing. This expertise extends to vacuums: upright, canister, handheld, and robotic.

The Tests

We built an entire obstacle course in our laboratory to test robot vacuums like Roombas. The area contains obstacles that mimic furniture legs, shelves, and thresholds. Each robot vacuum has three chances to prove itself.

For the first two runs, we place cork pellets under the shelves and between the furniture legs. For the final test, we use pet hair instead. With our mess laid out, we let the robot vacuum loose. We’re looking for how long a cleaning cycle takes, which obstacles give it trouble, its suction power, and overall dirt and debris pickup.

What You Need to Know About The Best Roombas

We find that consumers are most satisfied with their Roombas when they view them as floor maintainers in between manual cleanings. They’re convenient, but their suction power just can’t match up to a full-sized vacuum. Generally speaking, a robot vacuum takes about a week to pick up the dirt that you’d get from a good vacuum cleaning.

Also note that the ideal floor types for most robot vacuums are bare floors and medium carpet. If you have throw rugs taller than ½ inch, your robot vacuum may not be able to climb atop it, or it may climb up and get stuck. This can also be an issue for pet beds.

What Does The + Mean?

The + means you get a charging base that empties your Roomba for you. It's much bigger than your average dock.
Credit: Reviewed / Jonathan Chan

The + means you get a charging base that empties your Roomba for you. It's much bigger than your average dock.

If you visit iRobot’s website, you’ll find that the robot vacuum brand offers both the Roomba i3 and the Roomba i3+ for sale. The major difference between the plus and non-plus version is in its charging base.

The plus versions boast a self-emptying feature. The charging base contains a built-in vacuum that suctions out the robot’s dirt bin, moving the waste into a sealed bag. This means you never have to get your hands dirty or smell anything gross. Each bag can hold up to 30 days’ worth of dust, dirt and debris.

What Is The iRobot Genius Home Intelligence?

The iRobot Genius Home Intelligence is an update to the existing iRobot Home app that you more control over where and when your robot vacuum cleans.

iRobot Home app shows its smart map of Reviewed's lab.
Credit: Reviewed / Jonathan Chan

iRobot Home app shows its smart map of Reviewed's lab.

The “where” is denoted by rooms on your smart map, which the Roomba i7+ and S9 models can detect automatically. You can designate special areas like the couch or under the kitchen table as “Clean Zones” for extra attention. You can also designate areas where you don’t want your Roomba to roam.

The update also gives you more control over when your Roomba cleans, through event-based automation. For example, you can integrate your home’s smart locks into your robot vacuum’s programming so that when you walk through your front door, the Roomba will return to its charging base. This works because iRobot Genius Home Intelligence is on the IFTTT platform, so it “speaks” a very common language that hundreds of smart home brands know.

iRobot Genius Home Intelligence is designed to work with anything on the IFTTT Connect platform.
Credit: Reviewed / Jonathan Chan

iRobot Genius Home Intelligence is designed to work with anything on the IFTTT Connect platform.

If you don’t want all your smart devices talking to each other, you can use a scheduling feature from your phone. To specify when and where to clean. For example, at 8 pm, after your dinner, you can schedule the Roomba to vacuum under the table and the Braava jet to mop the whole kitchen floor.

What About Data Privacy?

iRobot has pretty comprehensive documentation on how user data is stored.

Mike Gillen, director of product and data security at iRobot tells us, “Beyond internal initiatives, iRobot promotes and sponsors a public bug bounty program, submits products to external penetration testing, and conducts routine automated scans on iRobot’s operating environment.”

If you want to request data deletion, the easiest is through the app. However, we did catch this tidbit in the Privacy Policy: “We reserve the right to anonymize your personal data, including information about Robot and Service usage, and to retain your anonymized information for our own records and for product and feature development purposes.”

Basically, this means that iRobot will eliminate any connection between you and the data collected, but it may remain in iRobot’s servers.

Companies like iRobot and Ecovacs also follow the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, a set of European data privacy laws similar to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Bethany Singer Baefsky, director of privacy and DPO at iRobot, says, “iRobot follows the GDPR standard for everyone when it comes to deletion, and we do not limit it just to the EU. This means that wherever you are, if you request data deletion, your personal information will be purged within 30 days, in accordance with GDPR standards.”

She continues, “For data access requests, we comply with all statutory time frames. Where there is no statutorily required timeframe for providing data, or no legal requirement to provide data at all, we operate within the CCPA's framework and provide data in a commonly used, machine readable format within 45 days of receiving a verifiable request.”

Meet the tester

Jonathan Chan

Jonathan Chan

Senior Manager of Lab Operations

@Jonfromthelab1

Jonathan Chan currently serves as the Lab Manager at Reviewed. If you clean with it, it's likely that Jon oversees its testing. Since joining the Reviewed in 2012, Jon has helped launch the company's efforts in reviewing laptops, vacuums, and outdoor gear. He thinks he's a pretty big deal. In the pursuit of data, he's plunged his hands into freezing cold water, consented to be literally dragged through the mud, and watched paint dry. Jon demands you have a nice day.

See all of Jonathan Chan's reviews

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