✔️ Weight: Lastly, the weight of a vacuum makes all the difference when lifting it up and down the stairs and around the house. A heavier, larger option may be great for power and durability, but it's not ideal if you live in a multi-level home or want to vacuum hard-to-reach places.

It also struggled to lift everything, so our experts had to clear out remnants manually. This somewhat detracts from its practicality, but you shouldn't have to worry about capacity too often as the dock is designed to hold weeks' worth of dirt.

This combo vac-and-mop performs very well on both hard floor and carpet, and it's nice and easy to use thanks to a very well-designed app. It also takes care of emptying itself, meaning less intervention is required from you.

At the Good Housekeeping Institute, we tried them on both hard floors and carpets, assessing their performance by measuring how much of our specially formulated dust was picked up after a number of sweeps.

These small-scale vacuums are ideal for cleaning up spilt food and keeping on top of dust in between more thorough cleans.

The companion app works extremely well – our tester was especially impressed that it automatically partitioned the rooms into their own spaces. In terms of performance, we had almost no issues with this robot vacuum at all – if it's in your budget, it's worth the investment.

The Narwal Freo X Ultra is the best robot vacuum for carpet. It's a premium product, (and it's not available in the UK), but delivers the best carpet cleaning performance of any robovac we've tested. On test we found that not only did it suck up finer dust and dirt efficiently, it also Top 3 Automatic Vacuum Cleaners scooped up larger debris – namely bits of cereal – just as well.

In our Lab tests: The Samsung ran for well over an hour, had excellent pick-up power and used AI technology to automatically adjust the suction and brush roll speed to the flooring type. Three cleaning modes — min, mid and max — adapt it to different carpet pile heights and densities.

They also can't really match manual vacuums for suction power, so while they can help you stay on top of dust build-up, most people will want to supplement their work with the occasional deep clean with a manual vacuum.

All the robot vacuums in this ranking have been rigorously tested, either by one of the TechRadar Homes team or an experienced reviewer. Meet some of the expert reviewers who tested the robovacs that feature in this guide.

If you frequently use a handheld vacuum to tackle small areas of debris on your carpet or kitchen floor, then they’ll take the pressure off your back too. Many also have mopping capabilities, so are great multi-taskers.

Robot vacuums and mops are some of the most advanced appliances we test here at the Good Housekeeping Institute, so we have high expectations, but even we’re still sometimes surprised by the innovations.

Like most stick vacuums, this Dyson converts to a hand vacuum, though at over 6 pounds, it's heavier than others we've tested, and all this fancy technology comes at a bit of a steep price.

Navigation is excellent and this bot can also be relied upon to identify and avoid obstacles as required, meaning you can leave it to do its own thing without having to worry about it getting stuck or trying to suction up something it shouldn't. On test we also found it was great at hosting itself over tall thresholds.