I Have a New Favorite Robot Vacuum
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For the past three and a half years, our top picks for thebest robot vacuumhave only been capable of vacuuming. We’ve had separate picks for robots that can also mop floors, but none of the combos I’ve tested have been affordable enough to qualify them for the top spot. That’s changed with Roborock’s Q7 M5+. It’s better at cleaning floors than our previous picks and powerful enough to suck fur out of thick carpets, plus it has a mopping function that would have been reserved for a more expensive robot several years ago. All of that, combined with a relatively low price and Roborock’s excellent navigation software and intuitive app, made naming this our new top pick an easy call.
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It’s a powerful, fairly inexpensive robot
In my tests, the Q7 was just as effective as theRoborock Saros 10R, which has more than double the Q7’s listed suction power but costs over $1,000 more, for picking up the typical dirt and debris a house accumulates. The only instance where its weaker suction was evident was in picking up coffee grounds from a rug. The Saros left behind an almost negligible amount, while the Q7 left just enough behind to warrant a quick cleanup with my handheld vacuum. No robot I’ve tested has been able to entirely clear a carpet of tiny specks, but the Q7 gets closer than any other I’ve seen for this price.
There isn’t much else the Q7 can’t pick up. In cleaning up a week’s worth of pet hair (I currently have five dogs living with me) and other debris, this robot’s brush never got tangled and didn’t leave any hair behind. That’s largely thanks to a comb that rests just above the brush. As the brush spins, the comb grabs onto any hairs and pulls them away from the brush to ensure nothing gets caught. So far, I haven’t had to yank any hairs off the brush myself.
Roborock’s software is top-notch …
The Q7’s accompanying app — one of the most robust in this category — is capable of a lot more than just letting you tell the robot where it can and can’t clean. It can store up to four maps (2-D or 3-D) and has the option to do spot cleanings, so you can pick up a spill without having the robot scrub your entire floor. You can also schedule cleaning jobs, set times where it can’t clean or empty its dustbin, and create unique zones to clean spots with heavy traffic more often.
As with Roborock’s other vacuums, including the Saros 10R, there are also options to tweak the intensity of the robot’s vacuuming and mopping as well as how many times it goes over your floors during a cycle. You can set it to “vacuum” and then mop your floors or do both at once, though because its mopping pad doesn’t lift like on more expensive robot vacuum-mop combos, you should run them separately if you have any rug or carpet to avoid getting the rug wet.
The software powering the Q7’s navigation is quite impressive, too. It uses a combination of bump sensors and Lidar detectors to zoom across your home, and in my experience, rarely runs into obstacles. At any given time, my floors are covered with food bowls for my pack of pups, toys my niece and nephew left out, and usually a stray cable or two. I haven’t had to worry about that with the Q7.
… But it lacks object recognition
Great as that all is, getting a good robot at such a low price does come with some sacrifices. The Q7 manages to avoid most obstacles, but it sometimes gets caught on things more expensive robots don’t. For instance, I have a small side table in my living room that has two pieces of metal at the bottom for support. The Q7 gets stuck on it every time I run it, while Roborock’s smarter and pricier Saros 10R is able to recognize the obstacle and lift itself up to get over it. That’s not a huge problem, though, as you can designate areas as “no-go zones.” It just means you’ll have some spots to tidy up by hand.
It can mop your floors, but not as well as other robots
In previous years, robot vacuums with mopping capabilities have been too costly to recommend as best overall picks and have only been recommended separately. Because the Q7 is such a capable vacuum, it’s particularly impressive that Roborock managed to pack a passable mop into such an affordable robot.
Unlike more expensive robots with mopping capabilities, the Q7 doesn’t have rotating pads or a self-cleaning brush. Instead, it uses a removable mopping pad that older robots like some Roombas have. While it can’t apply as much pressure as those other methods, and you have to wash the mopping pad by hand (there’s no self-cleaning function in the dock), I’ve still found the mopping to work well enough to help me clean up spills and tidy up my floors between manual mopping sessions. You can run it with either plain water or with a bit of cleaning fluid added, and either way there’s a noticeable shine to the floors after a mopping run.
That’s all about on par with what a robot that cost around $800 could have done several years ago, but it doesn’t have everything our current picks for the best vacuum-mop combos do. The dock doesn’t have a clean or dirty-water tank, so you have to refill the on-device water tank and empty it by hand. And because it can’t apply as much pressure as robots with rotating pads or brushes, it’s not as good for scrubbing out sticky or caked-on messes. Finally, as noted above, its inability to lift its mopping pad while vacuuming carpet adds an extra step to keeping the robot clean. That all makes this robot require a little more work from you than pricier vacuum-mop combos, but not enough to detract from how well it works for a robot under $400.
You won’t find a better robot vacuum for this price
The Q7 isn’t the first of Roborock’s vacuums to wow me, but I’ve never been more impressed with the quality of a vacuum this cheap. It has enough suction power to drag fur out of a carpet and is smart enough to dodge nearly all the obstacles that come with a house full of kiddos and pups. There are better vacuum-mop combos out there, but none in this price range. If all you need is a robot that can keep your floors clear of dirt and debris, plus supplement your manual mopping, this is the robot to get.
Other robot vacuums we like …
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