We Tested 16 Newfangled Robot Vacuum-Mop Combos. Don’t Buy One.

I tested 16 robot vacuum-mop combos made by companies such as Roborock, iRobot, Narwal, Ecovacs, and Eufy.

Most of these bots contain everything a traditional robot vacuum does for picking up dry debris, including brushes, dirt sensors, and a dustbin.

But their mopping capabilities varied significantly.

The simplest models, some of which cost as little as $100, have a single water reservoir and a static, Swiffer-like pad; they basically spritz and wipe, as the pad accumulates grime.

More-advanced models have pads that vibrate or move back and forth to scrub off dirt, along with self-emptying docks.

The fanciest robot mop-vacs have two rotating mop pads and return to the dock mid-clean to dump dirty water, clean their brushes, and automatically refill with cleaning solution. Some have sensors that can detect spills and stains, and they’re theoretically able to differentiate between types of flooring, to avoid mopping a rug, for example. But most of these models cost over $900.

All of the models I tested have apps that store maps of your home, and almost all of them allow you to label rooms, designate no-go zones, and schedule and control the robots remotely. Some models even have a built-in video camera, so you can monitor your home while you’re out.

I first tried nine bots in my pet-ridden, multi-story home, observing their performance on parquet floors, heavily textured tiles, and vintage rugs.

I noted how the bots maneuvered across and cleaned alongside thresholds. I also took note of how they interacted with a busy household, including a husband bustling around the kitchen, two capricious rabbits, and two aging cats.

This led me to dismiss five of them (the iRobot Roomba i5 Combo, the Dartwood Smart Robot, the Eureka E10S, Ecovacs Deebot X2 Omni, and the Eufy Clean X9 Pro) right off the bat, due to malfunctioning or particularly lackluster cleaning performance.

Then I ran the remaining 11 bots through a series of controlled tests, for over three weeks in Wirecutter’s Long Island City, New York, testing facility. I outfitted an area the size of a 400-square-foot living room, and I ran the bots on low- and medium-pile rugs and vinyl flooring. And I tested their nimbleness around furniture, a baby bouncer, toys, cables, and (fake) poop.

Using a similar protocol to how we evaluate robot vacuums, I measured each machine’s vacuuming power.

And I observed how smoothly each robot vacuum-mop combos navigated the test course, documenting each model’s ability to avoid obstacles and whether it could free itself when caught.

To test the robots’ mopping capabilities, I filled the tanks with warm water and, when applicable, the company’s cleaning solution.

I then unleashed the bots on various dried stains, including coffee, milk, and caramel syrup. And I used the models’ deep-cleaning/scrubbing modes, when available.

I also compared their self-emptying/self-cleaning docks, evaluating the convenience of carrying and cleaning them.

I reviewed the robots’ apps, assessing ease of setup, mapping speed and accuracy, intuitiveness of setting up no-go zones and room labels, and availability of cleaning features. In most cases, I contacted a company’s customer service department to evaluate its representatives’ friendliness, timeliness, and problem-solving skills.

And I invited a group of paid testers, with different backgrounds, builds, and mobility levels, to give the bots a whirl and share their impressions. They were not impressed.

Most can either vacuum or mop decently—but not both

Most combos were able to vacuum well or mop somewhat decently—but not both (and certainly not at the same time).

The $1,300 Dreame X30 Ultra, for example, picked up the most dry debris, but its mopping performance was among the worst in its price range.

Inversely, the Roborock Qrevo and Qrevo MaxV models mopped okay, but their vacuuming was subpar.

John Ord, a lead engineer at Dyson, explained that the need to pack in a water tank and fluid-delivery and mopping systems will necessarily compromise vacuuming performance—there’s only so much tech you can cram into one tiny bot. That’s why his company focused on its bot’s vacuuming power, instead of adding a mopping function, Ord said.

Most machines claim they can vacuum and mop at the same time, but I learned the hard way that it’s usually better to tackle wet spills in the mop-only mode (or, better yet, by hand).

I tried to mop up a tablespoon of milk and a few Cheerios using the $1,200 Ecovacs Deebot X2 Omni. Instead of cleaning it, this machine first smeared the spill around and then started rattling and gurgling, unable to dock or cross thresholds.

After cleaning, drying, and retrying, I declared the bot broken. (The Deebot X2 Omni’s manual states that the machine shouldn’t be used on wet surfaces, and a spokesperson told us it’s industry-wide practice to clean spills before running the robot. Other companies, like Eufy, Narwal, Dreametech, and iRobot, claimed their robots could handle small quantities of liquid.)

Though most machines claimed to have some sort of hair-detangling technology, only the Narwal Freo X Ultra succeeded in sucking in 18-inch-long strands and ferreting them to the bin (instead of wrapping them around the brush roll).

They struggle with dried stains

Even robots costing upwards of $1,500 didn’t possess any magical stain-erasing powers. In fact, most of the bots would roll over dried milk or coffee stains once or twice and then give up, leaving the stain as a ghostly reminder of breakfast—or, worse, spreading it across the room.

The Eufy X10 Pro Omni ($800) is one of the least expensive models with rotating pads that I tested. It was able to remove lighter dry coffee stains by going over the same spots several times, but it didn’t make a dent in heavier coffee or milk stains. (It did a surprisingly good job on caramel syrup, a category all other machines fumbled.)

Only three models—the Roborock Qrevo MaxV, the Narwal Freo X Ultra, and the Yeedi M12 Pro+—managed to erase the dried coffee stains entirely. (The Roborock and Narwal machines have dirt-detection sensors, which impel the robot to go over the stain more than once.)

And only the Narwal robot could vanquish the milk stain. But it took the machine 40 minutes, with the robot running back and forth between the stain and the dock to clean its mops and refill its water reservoir. In comparison, it took us less than half a minute to wipe up the same stain with warm water and a Bona Premium Microfiber Mop.

They’re inconsistent navigators

The robots I tested were packed with navigation features.

You can program them to focus on or avoid specific areas of your home or to clean the bedroom last, and you can follow them along in real time on little interactive maps of your floor plans.

The bots claim to steer clear of obstacles and differentiate between hard flooring and carpets. But frustratingly often, they got lost, confused, or entangled, or they started mopping the wrong type of surface.

When I sent the Dreame L20 Ultra ($850) on its mop run, it initially avoided the dried-on stains we’d placed because it got confused by the blue painters’ tape we’d used to mark the area. (Maybe it mistook the tape for a drop or an obstacle?) The robot approached the stains only after the tape had been removed.

On the other hand, only a handful of the machines I tested avoided our fake poop reliably, including the L20 Ultra and its cousin, the Dreame X30 Ultra ($1,300). These two even showed little poop icons on their map. (The pair came out among the best in our vacuuming tests, too.)

Meanwhile, the Ecovacs Deebot T30S got lost on a rug, spinning in circles and actually mopping the rug with its pads. Shortly after, it got stuck on the baby bouncer (it eventually managed to free itself but quickly returned and got hung up again).

I observed other combos spinning endlessly while searching for their docks or leaving areas they’d been instructed to clean untouched. Yet they also often had a magnetic attraction to obstacles I wanted them to avoid, like cords or poop.

And all of the models were prone to ignoring baseboards and thresholds, resulting in an accumulation of grime around the edges of a room.

The Roborock Qrevo and the Qrevo MaxV were relatively reliable navigators, cleaning in an orderly pattern and finding their way back to their docks, without quitting mid-job or getting stuck on the edge of a rug. But unlike the Eufy X10 Pro Omni, which, in my tests, detected obstacles down to the size of a rubber band, the Roborock machines drove over cables and poop without hesitation.

On the plus side, they are good climbers and don’t give up easily. A bunched-up pet rug? No problem! A ¾-inch threshold? They’ll just bulldoze their way over it.

The more-advanced bots had sensors that supposedly allow them to detect different types of flooring, so they won’t start mopping your Persian rug. But I found that when they were on carpets, even those bots that successfully raised their mopping pads (usually about ¾ of an inch) still left the edges of the rug damp. This can be particularly problematic if the machine crosses a light-colored carpet after mopping up coffee, a brightly colored drink, or urine.

The only machine that didn’t wet rugs at all was the iRobot Roomba Combo J9+, which elegantly lifted its mop pad above its body. (Unfortunately, it wasn’t very good at mopping when it was actually supposed to.)

Some bots, like the Ecovacs Deebot T30S and the Yeedi M12 Pro+, raised their mopping pads only slightly. So you’d need to roll up your carpets altogether before mopping. And both bots started to actively mop the rug on occasion.

They’re large, loud, and require maintenance

The bots with self-emptying docks weigh between 10 and 30 pounds, and they have about the same footprint as a large garbage can. Due to the size and heft of these bots, you can’t easily use them on multiple floors or even in different areas of a home.

The bots are noisy when self-emptying, and it’s hardly a hands-off experience. You can push off emptying the dust bag until it’s about to explode, but you can’t exactly ignore a bucket of fetid mop water sitting in your living space.

Some companies have started adding auto-refill and drainage systems, but this is still a relatively rare feature. (I wanted to try the SwitchBot S10, which is supposed to connect to your plumbing system, but wasn’t able to get it going.)

Either way, the area of the dock that washes the mop pads needs regular scrubbing, since it tends to collect muck and liquid. You also need to occasionally machine-wash and replace the pads.

New bags, brushes, and filters add to ongoing expenses. Roborock’s brush roll, for instance, is particularly prone to damage—one tangled cable and it looks like a dog’s chew toy.

But their apps are pretty slick

To their credit, most of the robot vacuum-mop combos I tested were a breeze to set up.

After installing your machine, you plug it in, download the app, and scan a code or pick your model from a list. The app then walks (and talks) you through connecting your machine to your Wi-Fi so you can control it with its app.

Of course, there were outliers. iRobot’s app is prone to crashing, and I spent hours trying to initiate the SwitchBot S10. After it failed to connect to our Wi-Fi, I contacted customer service and was told that my Wi-Fi ID and password shouldn’t have special characters. Despite a SwitchBot spokesperson later assuring me this requirement was removed and giving me troubleshooting tips, I still couldn’t get the machine to work.

The most feature-packed apps come from Roborock and Ecovacs. Once you’ve set up your bot and mapped your home, the apps’ fairly accurate maps let you divide and label rooms and set up no-go zones.

They also let you choose between vacuuming and mopping (or both), adjust suction power, and fine-tune how much water and scrubbing power the mop uses. You can even create “scenes,” a function that allows you to tell your Roborock Revo or your Ecovacs Deebot to mop the dining room first and vacuum the playroom second, or to vacuum on Sundays and mop on Mondays.

This doesn’t mean the apps always work perfectly. In my tests, saved maps sometimes vanished into thin air, and newly named rooms reverted to their generic labels.

One of our older paid testers found managing the Roborock robots through the app a “cognitive and visual effort,” while acknowledging, “It keeps the brain sharp.” Others remarked that they wished the app had more explanations. All of our testers found the Roborock app’s remote control (which allows you to take over and control the robots’ direction) to be unintuitive.

Despite the flaws and frustrations of the robot vacuum-mop combos I tested, it appears they’re here to stay, and companies are invested in improving them. Dozens of new mop-vacuum bots have been released just since I completed testing.

“We're at a stage where iteration happens very quickly,” Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager who tracks the smart vacuum market at the International Data Corporation (IDC), told me.

Indeed, the smart-home appliance market has more than quadrupled since 2018, and the global robotic vacuum cleaner market is expected to expand from $11.97 billion in 2021 to $50.65 billion by 2028.

When a “first mover” (such as Roborock or Ecovacs) releases a new product, “fast followers” (like Eufy, Switchbot, and Eureka) imitate their innovation, releasing a similar product quickly to gain market share. Due to the demand for “price diversity” and the fierce market competition, it is not unusual for a company to launch a glitchy model in January, followed by another flawed model in April, with each model boasting one or two (often insignificant) updates to attract new consumers.

“They’re creating the problem for themselves, essentially,” Ubrani said. “If everyone waited, then we would have slower releases but better releases.”

Samrat Sharma, US and global marketing and commerce transformation leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), took a more optimistic view. “Consumers in general are waking up to the benefits of automation,” Sharma told me, adding that most of us would prefer to pass on mundane household chores to a robot. “The next three years are just going to be a lot of fun for consumers.”

Some new companies are taking their time. Matic is in the final stages of developing a robot vacuum-mop that will have a higher-functioning brain that mimics human perception, claims Mehul Nariyawala, the company’s co-founder. The Matic machine will supposedly be able to understand hand gestures in addition to words, for example.

Nariyawala said Matic’s premise was not to develop a bot that never makes mistakes but instead one that learns from them. “Can you fail gracefully?” Nariyawala pondered. “Can you make sure that you're not going to make the mess worse?”

It’s clear that robot vacuum-mop combos are still in their infancy—just as all robot vacuums once were.

Likely, there will come a time when these combo cleaners are terrific. But that time hasn’t come yet. So for now, hold off on buying one for a couple of years—and hold onto your $20 mop.

This article was edited by Courtney Schley and Ben Frumin.