Best Roombas of 2025: A guide to iRobot vacuums, tested at home

Only a select few are willing to pay over $1,000 just to take a few chores off of their plate. So naturally, the fanciest Roomba will only be a practical investment for homes with several pets, homes with high-traffic hard floors, people who hate mopping, or folks who want the highest possible level of automation. And even if you do have the budget, anyone considering the Roomba Combo 10 Max should absolutely wait until it goes on sale for $999.

The Combo 10 Max is also a wise next step for households that have been using an outdated Roomba for too long and want to upgrade. Rather than enduring the struggle period that is re-mapping, the iRobot ecosystem allows home maps to be transferred between Roombas via the iRobot app.

Only one main feature separates Combo 10 Max from all of the Roombas before it, but it’s a huge one that makes me definitively recommend the Combo 10 Max over the Combo j9+: a self-washing and self-drying mopping pad.

Before the Combo 10 Max dropped in the summer of 2024, iRobot was in limbo in terms of innovation — it was the only big robot vacuum brand that still made its users manually wash their robot vacuum’s mopping pad. In my experience, having to face the soggy mopping pad every few days was enough to make me avoid mopping with any older Roomba altogether, so the Combo 10 Max’s AutoWash dock is an upgrade to take seriously. The water tanks and dust bag can also be accessed through a door on the front of the dock rather than the top, allowing the Combo 10 Max to hold decor full time.

why does that come into play with pet hair — hardwood and tile floors get just as covered with pet hair as the rugs and carpets do. those mopping pads are going to be covered in wet pet hair that i sure as hell would prefer the robot deal with, not me.

The Roomba Combo 10 Max is also one of the most powerful cleaners of all the Roombas, dishing out what iRobot says is 100 percent more suction power than the Essential series and lower-tier j series Roombas through a four-stage cleaning system (versus the typical three-stage system). While it’s pretty reliable on various crumbs and cat hair on my rugs, I’ve personally been disappointed with the hit-or-miss results in the corners of my bathroom and along the edges under my kitchen counter.

I’ve noticed the boosted cleaning power much more on the mopping front due to iRobot’s SmartScrub feature, which spends extra time, water, and elbow grease on any extra dirty areas that you designate in the app. I can feel the tension in my shoulders release when I see the Combo 10 Max go back and forth over spots I know would still be sticky after one pass.