Flagship robotic vacuums have gotten REALLY good, but for most people spending $1500 or more on a robotic vacuum is out of the question, and I get it. So, in this video I’ve got seven of the most popular robotic vacuums under $400 and we’re going to see if any of them are worth buying and as always there are no sponsored reviews on this channel. First, we’ll test their vacuuming performance on carpet and hard flooring. Then we’ll test their ability to pick up long human hair without getting tangled and we’ll challenge their auto empty bin systems. Then we’ll test noise level, battery life, navigation, object avoidance, and finally app performance. Then I’ll give a breakdown of the scores and some recommendations.
Vacuuming Performance – Carpet
To test vacuuming performance, I prepared a mixture of 10 grams each of rice, flax seed husks, salt, and flour to simulate different sized dirt and dust and ran each vacuum on their maximum suction power using a vacuum only two pass cleaning. I weighed the dustbins before and after each cleaning task, and I thoroughly vacuumed with a corded upright between tests.
First, the least expensive vacuum in this video is the $279 Dreametech D10 Plus, which until recently was the vacuum that I’d been using for the last two years in my mostly carpeted second floor, but I did get a new D10 Plus for this video so it would be a fair comparison. During the carpet performance test, the Dreametech D10 Plus cleaned for 22 minutes, used 23% of its battery, and picked up 25 grams or 62.5% of the mixture, and after the auto empty process, nearly all the debris had been cleared from the bin.
Next, also for $279, sort of, is the Shark Matrix Plus. I say sort of because I picked up this vacuum off the shelf from Costco for $279, but when I was at Best Buy, I noticed that the same vacuum was $399 and on Amazon this model is only available as refurbished for $179. The Shark vacuumed the carpet for 30 minutes and used around 50% of its battery while picking up slightly less debris than the Dreametech at 24 grams or 60% of the mixture and after the auto empty process the Shark’s bin was completely clean but the non-removable filter was pretty clogged with flour and carpet fluff.
After that for $298 is the eufy L60 SES which stands for self-empty station, and the eufy cleaned for 42 minutes and used 47% of its battery but unlike any vacuum I’ve ever tested before it decided to empty its dustbin in the middle of the run, so I ended up measuring the bin four different times and after a little math I determined that it unfortunately picked up just 21 grams or 52.5% of the flour, salt, flax and rice mixture putting it in last place so far. But after the two auto empty sessions the bin was completely empty, though there was quite a bit of flour caked into the mesh prefilter area.
Next is the Roomba i5+ Combo that I picked up on Amazon for $350, but it was $450 at Best Buy. Roomba is of course the most recognizable name in Robotic vacuums, but it’s been a long time since they’ve had a competitive flagship, so I’m interested to see how their more budget friendly model performs. In the carpet pickup test, the Roomba i5+ vacuumed for 59 minutes and used 70% of its battery to pick up 22 grams or 55% of the flour, salt, flax and rice mixture, putting it in 2nd to last place and after the auto empty process the Roomba still had a significant amount of debris left in the bin.
After that is the $360 Roborock Q5 Max+, and the Roborock had a great showing with a lot of similarities to the Dreametech, cleaning for 22 minutes total and using 23% of its battery, but the Roborock had the best pickup score yet cleaning 27 grams total or 67.5% of the mixture, and after the auto empty process the Roborock’s giant bin was almost completely clean and even the filter was mostly free of dust and debris.
Following that was the $399 Eureka E10S, which cleaned for 36 minutes but only used 20% of its battery which is the best battery efficiency yet. Unfortunately, the vacuuming performance wasn’t great, and it picked up just 22 grams or 55% of the mixture, the same as the Roomba, and also like the Roomba the Eureka still had a decent amount of debris in its bin after the auto empty process.
And last the most expensive vacuum in this video is the new SwitchBot K10+ Pro which is technically just out of the budget range at $419, but the very similar K10+ is just $299. The main difference between the SwitchBot and the rest of the vacuums in this video is its extremely compact size which is supposed to help it fit into tight areas between furniture, but in the carpet testing the K10+ performed extremely poorly, picking up just 19 grams total or 47.5% of the mixture putting it solidly in last place, and it got stuck under my daughters desk chair twice, and my high pile carpet caused it to repeatedly give an error that its side brush was tangled, so I had to temporarily remove it so it could complete its run. After the auto empty process, the SwitchBot’s bin was mostly empty, but there was some mixture stuck in the corners and caked to the top.
So that means that the best carpet pickup score was the Roborock Q5 Max+ with 67.5%, followed by the two least expensive vacuums the Dreametech D10+ in second at 62.5%, and the Shark Matrix in third at 60%.
Vacuuming Performance – Hard Floors
To test hard floor performance, I used the same 40 gram mixture, again on maximum suction, two pass, vacuum only mode, but this time on my LVP flooring. As expected, the vacuums not only did a much better job picking up all the debris, but they also used less battery and the Roborock Q5 Max+ came out on top again picking up all 40 grams or 100% of the mixture, followed by the Shark, eufy, Roomba, and Eureka that all picked up 39 grams total or 97.5%, the Dreametech picked up 38 grams and the worst performer again was the SwitchBot K10+ Pro that picked up just 35 grams or 87.5% of the mixture off of the hard flooring.
Combining the two vacuuming scores together the Roborock Q5 Max+ easily took first place while the two least expensive vacuums, the Dreametech D10+ and Shark Matrix, tied for second.
Vacuuming Performance – Hair Testing
One of the biggest differences between these vacuums is the style of their roller bars, and there are three basic styles. You’ve got full bristle brushes like the Eureka E10S, full rubber brushes like the Roborock Q5 Max+, Roomba i5+ and SwitchBot K10+ Pro, and hybrid brushes like the Shark Matrix Plus, Dreametech D10+, and eufy L60. The main difference between them is how they handle long human hair.
To test this, I spread 2 grams of 14” synthetic hair evenly over my high pile carpet and sent the vacuums on a single pass cleaning, and after each pass I collected any missed hairs and gave the vacuums two separate scores, one for how well they picked up the hair and a second for how well they avoided brush tangles.
Starting with the pickup scores, the Dreametech D10+ and Roborock Q5 Max+ both picked up 100% of the hair for a perfect score of 10, the eufy and Eureka had just a small amount of leftover hair and scored 8 out of 10, the Shark Matrix and SwitchBot had a moderate amount of hair leftover, and the Roomba left by far the most hair on the carpet.
After that are the tangle scores, which are a little more complicated. At first glance the rubber brushes on the Roborock, Roomba, and SwitchBot look like they have almost zero tangles compared to the bristle and hybrid brushes, but in reality, they have almost the same amount of hair wrapped around them, but they are designed to collect hair inside the cavities on either side of the brush instead of on the brush itself. This strategy prevents the decrease in cleaning performance seen in bristle brushes that are wrapped with hair, but you will still need to clear the wrapped hair every 30 to 60 days to keep the brush rolling smoothly.
The eufy L60 base has a feature I’ve never seen before where a rotating blade comes up out of the slot to cut any hair tangles on the roller, but in my testing, it wasn’t particularly effective, at least with the synthetic hair and there was almost the same amount of hair on the brush both before and after the cutting process.
The Dreametech D10+’s hybrid brush performed pretty poorly and was completely wrapped with hair, but the good news is that all modern Dreametech vacuums use the same brush dimensions, so if you wanted a rubber only brush like the L10S you could just order one from Amazon and switch it out, or you could even get their premium $50 TriCut brush that has hair cutting blades built into the roller. I reran the hair test using the TriCut brush from my L10S Ultra and the only hair left on the carpet was this small 1” clump of cut hair, and aside from the hair wrapped on the side brush the TriCut roller itself was basically completely free of hair, which mirrors my experience with it over the last three months.
Auto Empty – Pet Hair
The other big difference between these vacuums is their auto empty systems, where some are rear mounted and some are bottom mounted, and both the Shark and Eureka bases are unique in that they use bagless canisters, so you won’t need to worry about buying replacement dust bags.
To test the auto empty base’s ability to clear pet hair clogs, I used five stretched and matted cotton balls to fill the vacuum’s bin, and then I triggered a single auto empty cycle and inspected the bin afterwards. And in this first test the Eureka E10S was the only vacuum that failed to completely clear its bin after a single cycle, but it was able to clear the remaining cotton after a second auto empty.
Auto Empty – Dense Debris
I also tested the auto empty system’s ability to clear more dense debris using 50 grams of uncooked rice and found that the Dreametech and SwitchBot were able to completely clear their bins, while the Roborock, eufy and Shark had just a few rice grains remaining in the corners, the Eureka had a moderate amount of rice remaining, and the Roomba struggled to clear any of the rice from its bin and had roughly 30 grams leftover after emptying.
Auto Empty – HEPA Filtering
I mentioned earlier that the Eureka and Shark bases use bagless debris canisters, and in the past a weakness of bagless systems was that they weren’t well sealed and could blow dust into the air during the auto empty process. To test for this, I set an air quality meter on top of the base during emptying and measured the surrounding air for particles of various sizes, and surprisingly the only vacuum that had any issue spreading dust was the SwitchBot K10+ which significantly increased particle count in the PM2.5, PM10, and PM1.0 range while none of the other bases measured any increase at all.
The main advantage of a bagless system is obviously to not have to buy bags, but be aware that the bags themselves act as disposable filters, so without them you’ll need to do some extra maintenance like cleaning the secondary filter on the Shark, and washing the entire filter basket of the Eureka periodically, which I personally don’t find appealing given that the disposable bags are much cleaner to use and change, last around 60 days in my house, and only cost about $1.50 each, so about $9 a year.
Operating Noise
Depending on when you run your vacuum, the noise level may or may not be important for you, so I measured the relative noise of each vacuum and here they are from loudest to quietest.
And I also measured the noise level of the auto empty bases, and here are those from loudest to quietest.
Next, let’s talk about navigation, path planning, object avoidance, and battery life because all of those things are very tightly related.
Navigation
With the exception of the Roomba, all these vacuums use a top mounted spinning LIDAR unit to map your house quickly and efficiently so they can make sure to get full coverage in the least time possible, but unlike more expensive robotic vacuums that also use structured light and cameras, these inexpensive models rely heavily on their front bump sensor to clean close to walls and navigate around furniture. That means they spend a lot of time clumsily bumping into things and changing direction, which can eventually result in scuff marks on baseboards, and the Roomba i5 relies completely on this bump and turn method which not only means its much worse at path planning, but it’s also jarringly loud when it slams into something it wasn’t expecting.
To test each robot’s path planning efficiency, I ran each vacuum on a single pass full clean of my entire first floor and recorded the total cleaning time and battery % used for each vacuum. I was pretty blown away by the differences, where the Roborock was the fastest, completing its full cleaning in 48 minutes using just 39% of its battery, and the Eureka had the best battery life cleaning for a total of 61 minutes but still only using 40% of its battery.
In contrast the Shark Matrix cleaned for 75 minutes over the course of two sessions because it had to stop and recharge after 65 minutes and completed a final 10 minute clean two hours later, and the Roomba had the longest cleaning time at 90 minutes total which as I mentioned is the result of it not really doing any path planning but more or less just randomly bumping its way around the house, and you can see that in the cleaning report there were still areas that it wasn’t confident that it covered compared to the Roborock that shows its exact path and every turn that it made.
Speaking of which, something that I personally love is waking up in the morning to fresh neat carpet vacuuming lines, and you can see that the Dreametech had by far the straightest and most uniform lines followed by the Roborock, SwitchBot, and Shark. The Eureka and eufy were okay, but they seemed to clean in random areas near the end of the cycle which messed up the overall neat lines, and the Roomba was definitely the worst with a lot of crooked lines and random pathing.
Object Avoidance
When it comes to object avoidance, as I mentioned before, one of the biggest differences between flagship robotic vacuums and these more affordable models is that flagships like the eufy S1 Pro use front mounted cameras and structured light sensors to make intelligent avoidance decisions, and you can see that in my object avoidance test using a pair of shoes, rubber dog poop, and a power strip, the eufy S1 Pro is able to identify each object and adjust its cleaning accordingly, keeping a safe distance from the dog poop, but understanding it can clean close to the shoes without causing a problem.
However, these more affordable vacuums rely on their bump sensors for their object avoidance which means they mostly just plow through everything and in my testing none of them were able to avoid the dog poop or cords, but all of them except the SwitchBot cleaned around the shoes without disturbing them too much. So, if you opt for one of these less expensive vacuums just know that you’ll need to keep your floors picked up and set up no-go zones for any areas where they could potentially get themselves into trouble, because they can’t avoid it by themselves.
App Performance
And that leads me into the last section, which is app performance. All of the vacuums will create a map of your floorplan using their various sensors, and of the LIDAR robots they all pretty much work the same when it comes to creating the initial map. However, I found that the Shark app had the best method of defining and separating rooms, and it’s the only app I’ve ever used that allows you to rotate no-go zones to account for diagonally placed furniture.
The Eureka, Roborock, and Dreametech apps also worked well for editing maps to create rooms and specify no-go zones, but they weren’t quite as intuitive as the Shark app. The SwitchBot app had all the same functionality as the others but wasn’t particularly user friendly and some of the options were confusing and hidden. The eufy app was the only one that I had a major issue with, and I wasn’t able to divide my floorplan into rooms, despite my best effort, but zone cleaning and no-go zones still worked fine.
The Roomba app is by far the most limited and buggy and even though I took the time to label my rooms and save the layout, every time the Roomba cleaned it seemed to forget about my map. Also, because it doesn’t have accurate lidar mapping, it doesn’t have the ability to use no-go zones, so you can’t keep it out of problematic areas. It was also the only robot that ever showed as offline, and annoyingly after a clean it takes a few minutes saving and uploading the map before you can ask it to clean again.
Conclusions & Recommendations
It’s conclusion time.
Here are all the scores normalized, grouped, and totaled and when it comes to pure cleaning performance the Roborock Q5 Max+ is the clear winner with the best carpet and hard floor pickup, best hair pickup and tangle avoidance, a nearly perfect auto empty score, and the best path planning and shortest overall cleaning time making it without question the best vacuum you can get under $400.
However, if you divide the total points by the price of the vacuum the best value is the Dreametech D10+, which again had very respectable carpet and hard floor performance, great path planning, and a perfect auto empty score, and it costs nearly 25% less than the Roborock at just $279.
If a bagless system is important for you, the Eureka also performed well and finished in third place overall behind the Roborock and Dreametech, and although I generally think the wet rag style mopping that you get at this price point isn’t worth using, the Eureka E10S has the most advanced mopping system of these budget robots with the ability to raise its mopping pad slightly when passing over low pile carpets.
As always there are no sponsored reviews on this channel, but I do have links below for all the vacuums in this video and as always, I appreciate when you use those links since as an Amazon Affiliate I do earn a small commission on the sale at no cost to you.
I’d also like to thank all of my awesome patrons over at Patreon for their continued support of my channel, and if you’re interested in supporting my channel please check out the links below. If you enjoyed this video, please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel and as always, thanks for watching The Hook Up.
