I tested the Roborock Q7 M5 robot vacuum cleaner and mop and it's ideal for first timers

Truth be told, I’ve always felt that even the best robot vacuum cleaners can’t quite outshine the top-tier traditional best vacuum cleaners, especially the corded powerhouses. Still, it’s been a full 12 months since my last round of robot testing, and with a fresh wave of new models hitting the market, I've been eager to see how their performance has moved on.

Enter the Roborock Q7 M5 — one of three brand-new contenders I’ve been putting through their paces this past month. While it’s the most wallet-friendly of the range, don’t be fooled by the price tag. It’s also the perfect sparring partner for my trusty old (and dirt cheap) Kyvol robot, which has been loyally patrolling my floors for years. So, is this budget-friendly upstart ready to clean up the competition — and your floors while it’s at it?

To put the Roborock through its paces, I kept it in my hallway, where it had easy access to my dining room and sitting room, for three weeks. I would then regularly bring it upstairs to test on my guest bedroom's low-pile carpet, and down a steep step into my tiled kitchen, where I could use its mop features. Here's how it got on.

Roborock Q7 M5 Robot Vacuum Review: Price and availability

The Roborock Q7 M5 has an official RRP of $299.99 and is currently available on the US Roborock site for $239.99and at Amazon for $249

While UK users can purchase this on Amazon or on the Roborock UK website for £179.99.

Roborock Q7 M5 Robot Vacuum Review: Design

Unpacking the Roborock was a bit like opening a Russian doll. It arrived in a sturdy, branded brown box with a convenient handle poking through the top, making it easy to bring into the house. Inside, a second sleek white box—as you’d find displayed in a retail store—illustrated details of its key features: three levels of water flow, 10,000 PA HyperForce suction power, a dual anti-tangle system, precise LiDAR navigation, multi-level mapping, quick mapping, a 270 ml water tank, and scheduled cleaning.

Inside the white box there was an instruction manual, spare mop cloth, and a moisture-proof mat. The vacuum itself came wrapped in a protective polythene bag with a thin film of cellophane on top.

The Roborock has a smart two-tone design with a textured grey-and-gloss black finish. A raised circular module sits on top—important for navigation.

Underneath, there’s a central brush roller, a rotating side brush, two spring-loaded wheels (which proved to be brilliant at handling changes in floor level), and an omni-directional wheel to guide it smoothly around the room.

The dustbin/water tank slides out easily from the side with a simple press of the release button, and there's a rubber stopper to seal the water tank.

Setting up the charging dock was straightforward. The dock is short and slim—about 7cm deep—so it can fit almost anywhere. I opted for the hallway to keep an eye on things over the testing period, but I could have easily placed the dock against the wall and under the sofa, out of sight.

So if you don't want your in-laws to know you're 'cheating' on chores by using a robot, you can be stealthy about it! The plug design was pleasantly slim too, fitting easily even into low or awkwardly placed sockets.

The included mat, designed to keep floors dry during mopping, sticks to the floor with double-sided tape, though I found it didn’t stay in place for long on my wooden floorboards. 'Rocky', as I inevitably named him, would slightly knock the mat to one side so it looked untidy. Eventually, I removed it altogether since I wasn’t using the mop in that main area of the house.

Next, I downloaded the app and attempted to connect the robot, which proved a little tiresome. It took several goes before the Roborock would connect to our WiFi. In the meantime, we started it manually using the physical buttons— one for “Home” and one for “Go”— and let it run on its default cleaning mode.

Additionally, the unit comes with an extra mop pad... and that's about it. In the past, I've known budget vacuums to come with a replacement rotating side brush, so that was slightly disappointing. It might also have been nice for Roborock to throw in at least a sachet sample of their specialist floor cleaner that can be used with the mop, which I'll talk more about on later.

Roborock Q7 M5 Robot Vacuum Review: App Experience

After a few attempts, I managed to get the app hooked up to my Roborock Q7 M5. When that's done the app will take you a series of 'Quick Start' slides, covering how to prepare your home before cleaning, how to familiarise your robot with your home, flagging the 'Do not Disturb' mode, and opting into 'Map Saving' so that the robot can 'remember' cleaning routes and you'll be able to use functions like Selective Room Cleaning and set 'No-Go Zones'.

You'll then go to the Device screen, where you can see how much charge your robot has. You can quick start your robot here by pressing the arrow button, or for more options, press the blue enter button.

From there, you'll be able to see your home maps, divided into rooms. You can select 'Full', which will clean all rooms on any one level, or select individual rooms to clean.

You'll also be able to select the cleaning mode by pressing the 'Vacuum' button bottom left. This brings up a whole suite of options. You can Vacuum (at the aforementioned choice of five suction power levels); Mop (at low, medium or high water flow levels), or Vacuum & Mop.

You can even customize to vacuum in some rooms and vacuum and/or mop in others. In principle, this is handy if you're going from one type of surface to another. However, as the damp mop attachment is still being dragged around, the reality is that you probably won't want to run the vacuum across carpet or even wood, even if it's not physically mopping. So I didn't really use this other than to test it worked (it does).

The only other button to really concern yourself with is the hexagon at the top right of the Home Screen. Press this and you can see the last cleaning time and area, the total cleaning time for the day, and be able to manage your cleaning schedule and a few other details.

You can schedule the robot to clean certain rooms or a whole mapped area at certain times once, daily, every weekday, every weekend day, or on specific days. You can also select the cleaning mode you want to use. The joy of this is you can add multiple scheduled events – for example you can schedule the robot to vacuum all the rooms daily and do a deep vacuum and mop of the kitchen twice a week, for example.

The maintenance tab will flag if any maintenance is required on the filter, side brush and main brush. And there's an option to change your robot's voice to a different language if you'd like to brush up on your French or Italian, for example.

Under more settings, you'll be able to set a child lock, which I found handy for when friends with pets came over. There's also an Off-Peak Charging option, where you can set the vacuum to only charge fully at certain times, while just drawing electricity to complete scheduled tasks and maintain minimal power otherwise.

All in all, the app was super responsive, albeit some of the key settings were a bit hidden. The hardest to find was 'Spot Cleaning, which was hidden under the Remote Control option. But after spending 10 minutes navigating through it, I was quickly able to find what I needed, when I needed it, and settings were super simple to add, change and cancel.

Roborock Q7 M5 Robot Vacuum Review: Performance

What's it like to use on hard floors?

To start with, we tested the Roborock across our hallway, dining room, and living room, simply by pressing the clean button on the vacuum rather than utilising the app. All three of these spaces have solid wooden floors. The robovac cleaned methodically, one space at a time—first tracing the room’s edges, then working back and forth in neat columns and rows. The navigation was generally smooth, though in our more cluttered living room, it was a bit haphazard.

Having said that, we did have two issues with Roborock Q7 M5 in the living room. One was that on the first clean it got caught in a pull in a rug, which caused it to lose the cover of its brush roller and grind to a halt. No harm was done (the rug was already pulled and the cover clipped back on with no issue), but if you have a precious rug, I'd think twice before letting the Q7 M5 loose.

The second issue was that while it glided under my sofa and armchair no problem, it kept getting stuck behind my TV cabinet. This was because the floor was uneven and the vacuum that bit too high to pass inn places. After the vacuum announced it had got stuck again for the third time, I decided to place a rolled up sheet at the front of the unit to stop it from attempting to pass under.

Which leads me to my next note on the Q7 M5—it's chatty. I actually think this is a good thing, as you always know what it's up to and can quickly deal with any issues. Whenever you remove or replace the bin, it will announce "Dust bin and water tank combo unit... removed" or "...installed".

It tells you when it's starting to clean, when cleaning is complete, or when it's returning to its base to recharge. And, of course, it will let you know if it's stuck and needs rescuing. If you do find it too loud though, there's an option to adjust its volume in the language settings. I kept it full blast through the testing though, so I didn't miss anything.

Noise levels were moderate on Balanced and Turbo modes: not whisper-quiet, but far from intrusive. You’d want to turn up the TV volume if it was cleaning in the same room, but from an adjacent space 'Rocky' was barely noticeable.

On both hard wooden and tiled floors, the suction performance was impressive. It easily picked up small debris like crumbs, bits of food wrapper, and even a stray cotton wool ball. The 10,000 PA suction really lived up to its promise here, making it excellent for everyday maintenance and surface-level mess.

We tested the Q7 M5's ability to pick up 20g each of Cheerios, kitty litter and a mix of dog and human hair on both a tiled kitchen floor and carpet. this is how it got on:

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The big caveat here is that while the Q7 M5 did 'pick up' a lot of human hair, the majority of it only made it as far as the brush roller, and had to be cut out. I will say it dealt with pet hair much better, gathering it into the dust bin nicely. The vacuum did manage to miss a couple of lightweight chunks of hair though.

What is it like to use on carpet?

In my view, this is where the Q7 M5 really excelled versus any robots I'd used in the past. The suction level is exceptional and it continued to lift dust from my low-pile carpets time after time.

I got into the habit of running the vacuum daily on the basis that "there couldn't possibly be that much more dust in there", but believe me, it kept coming. After feeling initially disgusted, I became obsessed, and long-term, Rocky will be living upstairs to tackle my bedrooms and bathrooms full-time.

As you'll see from my Cheerios/kitty litter/hair testing data, it wasn't quite as successful at picking up larger chuncks of debris as it was on hard floors.

However, as dust is my number one concern on carpet, and it's less likely that my bedrooms will be subjected to chunks of dirt and food crumbs, I didn't see this as a particular issue.

What is it like to use as a mop?

Attaching the mop pad was simple—it clips onto the removable dustbin unit via two holes at the bottom. According to the specification sheet, the Z7's water tank has a capacity of 270 ml. However, we used a measuring jug to fill it and found it started spilling over when we got to the 250ml mark.

Following Roborock’s instructions, we used plain cold water for our first clean. This didn't inspire us with much confidence that we'd get a hygienic clean as we couldn't add detergent. Roborock doesn't recommend using any detergents or disinfectants in the water tank other than its own proprietary detergent, which we didn't have to hand for the test.

After reading other reviews online that the mop can make the floor quite soggy, I decided against risking our solid wood floors and set it loose on my 5 × 10 ft tiled kitchen floor instead, on the medium setting. It cleaned the entire area in under five minutes, following its usual pattern—first the perimeter, then steady back-and-forth passes across the middle.

The floor was evenly damp afterward and dried within about 15 minutes at an ambient temperature of 18.5 °C. Post-clean, the tank had used roughly 50ml of water, suggesting it could cover the same area about five times before needing another refill.

The floor certainly wasn't as sopping wet as other reviews suggested, but still damp enough that I wouldn't risk it on real wood.

The mop function was as quiet as the vacuuming mode. While it did lift light surface dirt, it’s not designed for deep cleaning—stubborn or dried-on marks remained untouched. There’s no heat or scrubbing motion to tackle ingrained grime. However, as a quick refresh for floors that are already fairly clean, it works well. We later added a small amount of the floor cleaner that had come with a Vax ONEPWR model I'd previously tested (not officially recommended, but seemingly harmless), the results were slightly better and the room smelled fresher.

I did try the mop on the 'high' water flow setting, to see if it could remove a blob of ketchup I'd left on the tiles for a couple of hours. The results were 'meh'.

In short, the mop is great for light maintenance but not a substitute for a steam mop or dedicated floor scrubber if you need deeper cleaning. Not least because you can't hygienically disinfect it with your favorite product as I like to do.

Noise levels

Using a sound meter app, I measured the average volume of the Roborock Q7 M5 while standing around 1m away in these different scenarios:

Cleaning wood floors: 68 (Quiet mode) to 72dB (Max+)
Cleaning carpet: 53 (Quiet mode) to 70dB (Max+)
Cleaning ceramic floor tiles: 55 (Quiet mode) to 72dB (Max+)
Mopping ceramic floor tiles: 58dB

I only really found it to be intrusively noisy in Max and Max+ modes, but would only really want it to be running in Quiet mode when working, relaxing or socialising in the same room.

Roborock Q7 M5 Robot Vacuum Review: Ease of cleaning and maintenance

Looking after the Q7 M5 has been straightforward so far. The main jobs I've had to focus on are removing hair from the brush roller and rinse and dry the filter.

The latter is simple. Just remove the dust bin, take the filter and run it under the cold tap, then leave to dry in direct sunlight for around 24 hours.

To access the brush roller, you'll need to release its protective cover by pressing the two clips on the base. Once this is taken off, you'll be able to pull out the roller easily from one end. You can tease the hair off by pulling it, but I found it much easier to cut the hair and then unravel it.

I am yet to carry out any more heavy maintenance as instructed by the app, but will do so when the time comes and update this review.

Roborock Q7 M5 Robot Vacuum Review: What customers think

On Amazon, the Roborock Q7 M5 has an average 4.3 out of 5 stars global rating, from 1,420 reviews.

Users almost universally praise its ability to pick up dust and pet hair, which I'd totally agree with, as well as its powerful suction and quiet operation. Again, I concur – the Roborock is especially unobtrusive in quiet mode.

Like me, they were less impressed with the mopping mode and the fact you can't use detergent in the tank unless you purchase Roborock's formula. Some complained the mop left their floor very wet, which I didn't experience even in the highest mode.

Another regular complaint was the vacuum's ability to get lost and not find its dock, which I experienced a couple of times but not often. On those occasions I simply carried the robot and placed it back on its charging points and left it for a little while. When I returned, it seemed to have reset itself.

Roborock Q7 M5 Robot Vacuum Review: Comparisons

At time of testing, the most direct comparison I have had to make is with my older Kyvol cleaner—and it's fair to say the Roborock literally left it for dust! However, I am currently testing a Narwal Freo Z10 Ultra and a Tapo RV50. When these tests are complete I will be able to directly compare the three cleaners.

However, my first impressions are that the Roborock Q7 M5 offers exceptional value for money, especially when it comes to suction power. It lacks the convenience of self-emptying robot vacuums, but at this price point, you wouldn't expect that sort of functionality.

Roborock Q7 M5 Robot Vacuum Review: Comparisons: Verdict

I'd especially recommend the Roborock Q7 M5 as a first-floor cleaner for bedrooms given its incredible suction power and ability to remove-deep-seated dust from carpets.

It's a veritable mountain goat, with the common sense not to throw itself off of any steeper drops – for example the step down from my dining room to my kitchen. In general, I felt I could trust it alone in a room without getting into much trouble. Although, I'd be careful with precious rugs and any very low furniture in case it gets stuck underneath.

As a mop, it's fine for quick surface cleans, but I wouldn't rely on it for a hygienic deep clean, nor intense spot cleaning. It's at its best as a vacuum, and is great for regular scheduled cleaning and keeping on top of daily dirt and dust. At such a low price point, however I have no major complaints.