The smart appliance learns your cleaning habits, and can suggest extra cleanings during peak pollen and pet-shedding seasons. The Roomba i3+ EVO features iRobot’s “Clean Base Automatic Dirt Disposal” system, and empties your accumulated dirt into an enclosed bag. The iRobot Roomba 7+ uses an edge-sweeping brush to get into corners.
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This allows the 980 to offer better cleaning performance on thick carpets. The Roomba i3+ EVO strikes a nice balance between performance and price. It has the same self-emptying dust bin like on the S9+ and i7+ as well as wifi-connectivity and app control. It’s the most expensive, but it’s objectively the best performer with the most features. Bottom line, it’s arguably the best robot currently being sold anywhere. It has got convenience, digital mapping, keep out zones, and extraordinary performance.
Now, at what appears to be a permanent sale price of under $430, it’s a serious bargain. When it comes to vacuuming prowess, we want to know how effective each robot is against common crumbs and other debris, and also how it fares against much smaller particles like dust, dirt and sand. To find out, we use dry, uncooked black rice shark canister vacuum as a stand-in for the crumbs, and sand as an analogue for finer particles. Shows how much surface litter (cereal, rice, and peas) and embedded dust the vacuum picked up from a medium-pile carpet. The Roomba 980 (aka Roomba 981) still offers solid cleaning performance and a 120-minute run time with Recharge & Resume capabilities.
Finally, we do the work of combing through user reviews to see how real people interact with the product, and if it stands up to the test. I also like that you can use the S7 as two separate robots — a vacuum and a mop. It has a mop-only mode that moves in a tighter “Z” pattern and goes over the floors twice. I liked to send it out to vacuum everywhere first, then recharge and go out again to mop, which resulted in sparklingly clean floors.
We’ve found that as long as a robot has a brush roll and a side brush, it’ll pick up crumbs, tufts of pet hair, and other common debris from bare floors and low-pile rugs. That’s enough to keep most homes tidy, and most owners seem happy with those results. If you have thicker rugs, or if you just feel like owning a stronger bot, go ahead and spend a little more on a bot with better brushes or stronger suction. Every bot we’ve tested—even the latest models with sophisticated navigation and smart-home integration—has gotten trapped or tangled at least occasionally.
For example, you could send the robot to vacuum your kitchen and dining room after dinner while skipping the bedrooms and den so that the bot doesn’t disturb you while you’re relaxing or studying or whatever. And then you could tell the bot to clean those rooms at a time of day when nobody is around. Another option is to set up do-not-cross lines or no-go zones, which is a great way to keep bots out of areas where they tend to get stuck or make a mess (like around pet food bowls). The dust- and crumb-pickup stress tests are meant only to give us an idea of each bot’s cleaning power—they don’t tell the whole story, and we don’t place much weight on them when we’re deciding which models to recommend.
The Shark AI navigates well with LiDAR, has a bagless auto-empty base, and app for map and device management. One of the most common questions we have seen from our readers is the difference between the most high-end models from Shark and Roomba. You also have more options for controlling your Shark using your Smartphone and other methods.