Best robot vacuums for apartments, tested in my apartment

If you're picky about crevice cleaning, such as windowsills, couch cushions, or crumby desktops, your ideal vacuum setup probably involves a cordless vacuum to complement a robot vacuum's automated floor cleaning. If your home's storage space is proportionally as tight as your square footage, the Eufy E20 3-in-1 is a strategic way to maximize space on a mid-range budget.

Unlike most other big 2025 robot vacuum releases, the Eufy E20 doesn't mop. So, the target buyer should consider the amount of high-traffic hard floors their home has. If a small bathroom and kitchen are the only non-carpeted rooms, you might settle for skipping mopping to secure the space-saving power of a self-emptying robot-turned-stick vacuum setup.

Any robot vacuum that can convert to a handheld and stick vacuum would probably be a bang for your buck at any price. The Eufy E20 is generously priced at $649.99 (and even less on sale) — that's less than half the price of the high-end Dreame and Roborock models released alongside it at CES 2025. $649.99 is also the MSRP of my favorite Dyson vacuum, which doesn't come with a self-empty dock.

At 8,000 Pa, it vacuums with the same amount of suction power as the 2024 Eufy X10 Pro Omni that thoroughly impressed me during testing. Pickup rate of fine debris along edges and long hairs on rugs could be better, but the E20 reliably took care of all visible crumbs, rocks, and loose dust bunnies on my flat rugs, hardwood, and tile. I tended to switch to the upright cleaning head and its 30,000 Pa of suction power to tackle rugs with heavy layers of pet hair, which only really responds to robot vacuums with 10,000 Pa or higher. I personally appreciate the fact that the dustbin is transparent and that every cleaning run is started with a clean slate — it provides unequivocal proof of how much either vacuum was able to scrounge up off my floors.

On the smart mapping front, the Eufy E20 excels at getting to the right spot. It created a near-perfect map of my three-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment on the first try. I had to rework a few borders, but after that, the E20 accurately completed multiple spot cleanings on a daily basis without getting stuck under furniture or on a rug.

Read our full review of the Eufy X10 Pro Omni.

So you have enough hardwood or tile to justify a robot mop, and you really don't want to touch the soggy mopping pads all the time. Fair. The Eufy X10 Pro Omni has one of the most compact mop washing stations I've tested, and is on the more affordable side for a do-all dock — it goes for under $700 on sale.

Eufy's most premium robot vacuum cleaner boasts potent suction power for this price range, an effective double mopping pad system, small object avoidance, and a self-emptying dock that also washes and dries the mopping pads. You typically won't see a robot vacuum and mop combo that checks off all of those boxes for less than $1,000, so Eufy deserves some serious credit for squeezing it all in at such a digestible price point.

What's equally as impressive is that Eufy didn't cut corners on the performance of any of those features just to get them all on the list. It's one of the few hybrids armed with dual spinning mopping pads for more robust scrubbing than that of a single stationary pad, complete with an up-and-down mechanism that applies pressure during mopping and accurately lifts the pads completely above the surface when rugs or carpet are sensed. The 8,000 Pa suction power performed satisfactorily in multiple cleaning tests in my own apartment, including soaking up small wine and sauce spills, picking up crumbs of various sizes, and sweeping around the litter box daily.

In a small or crowded space, the X10 Pro Omni won't constantly get stuck. I had next to no issues when sending the X10 Pro Omni to specific rooms or zones for spot cleaning on the app, and Eufy's small obstacle avoidance was about 90 percent accurate when avoiding things like phone chargers and shoes. Bath mats were one thing the X10 Pro Omni was a little too cautious about, refusing to clean them because it thought they were towels (and the app doesn't let you dismiss incorrectly identified obstacles).

Read my full review of the iRobot Roomba Combo j7+ (the self-emptying, mopping version of the j7).

Robot vacuums that require you to tidy up the floor before they can safely complete a cleaning run miss the point of automatic cleaning completely. In a small space, where the chance of rogue clutter being on the floor is high, a robot vacuum with reliable small obstacle avoidance will be game-changing.

I think iRobot's small obstacle avoidance is the best on the market, and the Roomba j7 is the most affordable way to bring that home in standalone form if you don't have a free corner to house a self-empty dock. (If you stumble across it on sale at Amazon, you'll likely be able to snag it for 50% off.) The j7 successfully avoided every charging cord, slipper, and laundry pile in my home — a helping hand I appreciate every time I decide on a last-minute clean and don't have time to run around and grab stuff off the floor.

The j7's broader navigation in terms of maneuvering around furniture and accurately mapping rooms (or non-walled areas like the entryway) is similarly reliable. Its cleaning prowess is enough for light daily upkeep, but if one of your main cleaning concerns has to do with the thick mound of pet hair that's taking over your small space, you may want to check out the more powerful models in my list of robot vacuums that are specifically great for carpet.

Budget shoppers trying to stick near $200 still don't have to settle for a botvac that's perpetually disoriented. The Shark Matrix RV2300 maps incredibly accurately and in my experience, is an extremely reliable spot cleaner in terms of navigating to the selected area on the map as well as the vacuuming itself.

Because this compact standalone version doesn't have an auto-empty dock (the self-emptying one is still budget-friendly at $329), the ideal buyer won't mind manually emptying as long as navigation is seamless.

The standalone version of the base-tier Shark Matrix goes further than most robot vacuums in the under-$200-on-sale price range. Like the similarly-priced Eufy L60, the Shark Matrix RV2300 packs essential features like LiDAR-guided smart mapping used to send the robovac to specific spots or rooms, which I really do find to be a crucial feature even if you're only dealing with a few rooms. (Smart mapping is such a normalized feature nowadays that it's harder to find a vac without it than with it, anyway.)

Compared to, say, the cheapest-of-cheap Roombas in the sub-$200 price range, the Shark RV2300 goes further with Matrix cleaning: a back-and-forth crosshatch technique that gives the vacuum more opportunities to grab debris it may have missed on the first pass. This seriously upped the reliability of this vacuum in my eyes — and even though it wasn't the suction needed to dig cat hair out of my living room or bedroom rugs, it was more than enough to keep visible food crumbs out of the kitchen and kitty litter off the bathroom floor on a daily basis.