I’ve been testing this budget robot vacuum — it cleans well but has zero sense of direction

The Roborock Q10 S5+ is unfortunately not one of the best robot vacuums you can buy. While it’s pretty affordable, the input it requires means you would save a lot of time (and sanity) by spending a little extra on a more premium model.

For all its flaws, the Roborock effectively cleans carpet and hard floors, and the easy-to-use app means controlling its settings couldn’t be easier. But out in the field, this vacuum struggles with poor navigation, poor battery life, loud emptying, and a fiddly mop attachment.

To find out more about the vacuum, you can keep reading this full Roborock Q10 S5+ review.

Roborock Q10 S5+ review: Specs

Roborock Q10 S5+ review: Price & availability

The Roborock Q10 S5+ is available at Amazon U.S. for $549 and at Amazon U.K for £399. It’s pretty hard to recommend this robot vacuum at its MSRP, given the performance. But since its release in late 2025, it’s been on sale more often than not — and at the time of writing, it’s available at its lowest-ever price of $299 in the U.S. on Amazon, and at Amazon U.K. for £229.

There are other budget robot vacuums available with self-emptying docking stations like the TP-Link Tapo RV30 Max Plus, which is available for $219, but it has around half the max suction power of the Roborock. That said, when the Roborock uses its max suction power, the battery doesn’t last very long, so it’s not worth using.

For a super reliable option, you unfortunately need to spend more money. The Shark PowerDetect 2-in-1 ThermaCharged NeverTouch, which is available for double the price at $1,199, has an impressive battery life of three hours and cleans and dries its own mop pad. With the Roborock, you need to clean this yourself.

The point of a robot vacuum is convenience, but the Roborock is a lot more hassle than the price tag is worth. If you’re going to clean it and fix its mistake anyway, you may as well go for a model that doesn’t have an emptying dock, like the Roborock Q7 M5 for $249, which requires you to empty the dustbin after each use.

Roborock Q10 S5+ review: Design

The Roborock Q10 S5+ is available in black or white, and both color designs are good-looking. The robot itself measures 13.8 x 13.8 x 3.8 inches, which is the same size as the Ecovacs Deebot N20 ($199), as is typical for a robot vacuum. But the brush on the underside of the Roborock is slightly longer, so it can cover a greater area with one sweep. Some rotating brushes also come out of the side of the vacuum to sweep larger debris from the edges of the room into the line of the vacuum, to maximise the collection of debris.

Unlike the Deebot N20, the Roborock comes with a docking station for self-emptying. This dock measures 10.2 x 8.3 x 7 inches, so it’s a lot smaller than the dock that comes with the Shark PowerDetect 2-in-1 ThermaCharged NeverTouch, which measures 18.2 x 17.5 x 14.3 inches. This smaller size is great to save a little space and store easily, but the dock of the Shark can do a lot more, as it also refills water for mopping and empties it into a dirty water tank. The dock also cleans and dries the mop attachment, which the Roborock can’t do.

For mopping, the pad attachment is on the robot vacuum at all times. When moving across carpeted areas, the robot scoots up its butt so the wet mop doesn’t touch the floor. This same method is used by Shark robot vacuums to avoid wet floors. But when the Roborock is charging, the mop will be touching the floor. This means the wet mop will be soaking into your floor, which isn’t great.

The docking setup includes a plastic sheet with sticky tabs beneath, which attach to the floor to secure it — this is to keep floors dry. While the thought is nice, the execution of this feature is poor. It feels very cheap, and it’s easily damaged given the thin and malleable nature of the sheet. What's more, the vacuum also lifted the sheet off the floor while trying to dock, which prevented it from connecting for charging.

Rather than a dustbin, the Roborock has a dust bag. This feels very outdated as it’s a consumable, so it needs to be replaced every so often. You’re better off buying a robot vacuum with a reusable dustbin, like the TP-Link Tapo RV30 Max Plus.

Roborock Q10 S5+ review: App

The Roborock Q10 S5+ is controlled using the Roborock app. Of all the smart home apps I’ve tested, this one has to be the easiest to navigate. There’s a short walkthrough when you first fire the app up, but it’s pretty self-explanatory.

You can control charging, mapping, and clean cycles in the app, and there are a lot of options when it comes to suction power and cleaning levels. You can tailor each cleaning depending on what your home needs.

I like that you get detailed notifications in the app about what the vacuum needs, such as emptying or help when it’s stuck. But what I didn’t like was the frequency with which the notifications were coming through, making for a lot of proverbial hand-holding.

Roborock Q10 S5+ review: Mapping

The mapping function on the Roborock Q10 S5+ is the quickest I have tried in my testing of robot vacuums so far. But the time it saved during this step meant that the vacuum had some… issues.

The first issue I encountered was the vacuum making up room boundaries. It added two extra rooms to the ground floor of my home. Of course, it’s not the end of the world, as I was able to go to the mapping section of the app and combine rooms, but this wasn’t an issue I experienced with the Shark or Ecovacs mapping process.

I was able to name the rooms on the map to make it clearer to myself when selecting rooms to be cleaned. You can also tell the robot what type of floor each room has, so it knows whether to mop or vacuum with increased suction. All of the rooms in my house are carpeted apart from the kitchen, so by saying the kitchen has hard flooring, the robot knows to mop only this area, so no carpet gets wet.

You can set up no-go zones and even tell the robot what direction to move in, depending on the design of your floor.

The app can store multiple maps to move to different levels of your home, which is handy. You can also set up a cleaning sequence to tell the vacuum what order to clean the house in.

Roborock Q10 S5+ review: Vacuum performance

When the Roborock Q10 S5+ isn’t trapped, blocked, or simply lost, it does a great job of getting carpeted and hard flooring super clean. But as you can gauge, more often than not, the vacuum was trapped, blocked, or simply lost.

As I mentioned previously, the mapping process was very quick, but this means that obstacles weren’t mapped in detail. The vacuum uses LiDAR to navigate obstacles. This works by scanning to build a 3D map of the area, letting the vacuum know what obstacles it can get over, such as room boundaries, and what larger objects it should avoid.

It got itself stuck on table legs, caught in the fireplace, and even dented our wash basket from ramming into it over and over and over again. So, not only did the LiDAR struggle, but the front bumper (which is supposed to stop the vacuum from damaging other objects) proved very ineffective.

LiDAR mapping from Shark, on the other hand, is totally reliable. Sharknado, my lovingly named Shark PowerDetect 2-in-1 ThermaCharged NeverTouch, was on the other side of the room in its own docking station, mocking the Roborock.

The Roborock has up to 10,000Pa suction, but only when set at max power. With this setting turned on, the battery life is pretty shocking, and the vacuum has to recharge three times when cleaning my home, meaning that it took hours to clean.

You get 150 minutes of battery life in quiet mode, but this is vastly reduced if you’re using more powerful suction. I was only about to get around 30 minutes in the medium setting before it needed to dock and recharge.

The Roborock Q7 M5 also offers 150 minutes of run time and 10,000Pa suction, but doesn’t suffer the same battery woes.

Each time the vacuum docks, it empties the onboard dust bin. However, this process is incredibly loud and disruptive. I hardly notice the Shark PowerDetect 2-in-1 ThermaCharged NeverTouch when it empties. And when the Roborock Q10 S5+ has to go back to recharge more frequently when using higher suction levels, this becomes very annoying, very fast.

All that said, the vacuum actually does a great job of cleaning. It easily picked up small rocks and hair. I dropped some mixed seeds on the floor when making breakfast, and the robot vacuum had no issue with picking up every last one.

The Roborock uses an anti-tangle system to make sure the brush is always hair-free. This is effective since I had no issues with hair jamming or wrapping around the brush, and couldn’t see anything lingering around the bristles.

Roborock Q10 S5+ review: Mopping performance

The Roborock Q10 S5+’s mopping function is also effective, but my floors didn’t sparkle as much as when using my usual Shark robot vacuum. The Roborock uses a VibraRinse mopping system, which essentially vibrates the mop pad for an effective clean, but I find the side-to-side motion of the Evovacs Deebot N20 to be much more effective.

The mop also takes a while to get damp, so for the first section of cleaning the room, the floor stays pretty dry, which is annoying. You could wet the mop before it begins the mopping process, but that defeats the purpose of having a robot vacuum to take care of the dirty work for you.

You need to refill the water at the top of the robot vacuum and then empty it after each use, which is normal for budget robot vacuums without larger tanks. There’s no max fill line on the water tank, but you can adjust water flow for mopping through the app and adjust the amount of water you add accordingly, but this will be a case of trial and error.

The mop pad also needs to be washed after every use. Touching this is going to be pretty gross. The reason the Shark PowerDetect 2-in-1 ThermaCharged NeverTouch is so great is that it seriously requires no touching at all. It empties itself, refills the mop tank (from a larger water tank that you have to fill), and even washes and dries its own mop pad. It’s a lot more expensive, but the user experience is so much better, so I think it’s totally worth it.

Roborock Q10 S5+ review: Verdict

The Roborock Q10 S5+ takes the ‘smart’ out of smart-home. While it offers effective cleaning and an easy-to-use app that makes personalizing maps and functions a breeze, the positives are severely let down by how high-maintenance the device is.

The great thing about robot vacuums is that they can do the work for you so you can get on with other tasks around the house. But the Roborock is like a newborn that requires round-the-clock supervision.

Poor navigation means it spends most of its time getting stuck on table legs and bashing dents into things. And while it offers 10,000Pa suction, increasing to this power significantly reduces the battery life performance.

The mop filling, emptying, and cleaning makes me wonder why you wouldn’t reach for a more expensive model that can take care of all the dirty work for you. The point of these machines is convenience, and unfortunately, the Roborock only creates more work for you.