Review: Neato Botvac Connected

With robot vacuums, as with everything else in life, you get what you pay for. It boggles the mind, and the wallet, to say that $700 is a reasonable price to pay for great cleaning capabilities and a heretofore unprecedented level of control.

And yet, here we are. Cheaper botvacs don’t always have the necessary engineering for a thorough, automated clean. But paying a higher price for a robot that spends most of its time lurking under the couch gives me hives.

If you are willing to deal with a few quirks, the Botvac Connected is the best way to not shell out almost four figures for a thorough, reliable clean.

Like the lower-priced model in the same line, the Neato Botvac Connected is simple to use. Plug in the home base and set the botvac to charge. Meanwhile, download the app on your phone and pair it to the botvac. Name it (I chose “Mitchell”) and you’re ready to go.

Also like the D5, the Connected is compatible with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, IFTTT, and Facebook’s chatbot. Personally, I found the iPhone app (it’s also available on Android) to be a great way to interact with the vacuum, mostly because the Connected offers something that no other vacuum in this price range does.

Yes, folks, that’s right. Mitchell has manual control. Select “manual” from your cleaning options (you can also select “house” and “spot cleaning” modes) and a bunch of directional buttons pop up on the app. Most robot vacuums in this price range are completely automated; usually, it’s only the cheaper models that are expected to work like the love child of a drone and a Dustbuster. Personally, I find manual control so much more convenient to clean up spills or spot clean with a few swipes on my phone, instead of wrestling the push vac out of the closet.

Navigationally speaking, Mitchell is also much smarter than the D5. While the D5 dinged all our furniture and doorways, even trapping itself inside a bedroom, Mitchell’s movements are noticeably more cautious and deliberate. It helps that, unlike the D5, he has mapping capabilities. You can check each cleaning map in the app’s cleaning summary, zooming in on the botvac's home base and any areas that it might have gotten stuck.

The app warns that if you move Mitchell while he’s cleaning, the map may be inaccurate. Some of the maps looked straight-up bonkers, and I’m not sure it was entirely my fault. Even when I didn't move the vac, some maps showed a bedroom as being bigger than my entire living room and kitchen, or that a bedroom was behind the bathroom instead of next to it. It's imperfect, but I found it was good enough to let me monitor Mitchell in his cleaning journey.

Also as with the D5, the app accumulated a history of square footage cleaned and time spent cleaning. It took 2.5 hours to charge the Connected to full power, and a little less than two hours of run time to run the battery down to 10% in “turbo” mode, which was maximum strength for maximum pickup.

It took Mitchell between 45 minutes to 1:15 hours in turbo mode to clean between 300 and 500 square feet of my one-story, toddler, baby, and double-dog-haired abode. In turbo mode, I measured him as generating about 70 decibels’ worth of noise, which is the volume at which most people watch television. It’s loud, but endurable for the 45 minutes that it took to clean after dinner. He also has a quieter, longer eco mode which measures at a more reasonable 60 dB, but I preferred getting the vacuuming over as quickly as possible.

Certain operational quirks felt clunky. In my experience, the Roomba’s virtual walls are so much better at partitioning off areas than Neato’s magnetic strips. The strips don’t curve around problem areas, like the cord jungle under my nightstand, and it’s all too easy for toddlers, dogs, or visitors to move them unintentionally.

Bizarrely, the button to tell Mitchell to return to the dock only becomes active after he's passed the base three times. Before then, you can't push it. If I just wanted to spot-clean, I had to stop him, pick him up and return him to the dock myself.

Mitchell’s main cleaning brush gets tangled by long human hair more often than I liked (fortunately, he comes with his own tiny detangling brush). He also has a voracious appetite for bigger debris. Many times, I didn’t notice that Mitchell had snacked on small, vulnerable items until I noticed him making ominous clanking sounds as he meandered across the room.

Finally, Mitchell’s movements can be obtrusive. Mitchell approaches obstacles and rears up at them to clear them, engine whirring, levering his clunky body in the air and thunking it back down to the ground. His movements, if not his appearance, remind me of an AT-AT walker. For what it's worth, my infant and toddler are more afraid of Mitchell than they are of any robot vacuum that I've tested so far.

Plunking down $700 for a robot vacuum—heck, for anything—is a tough call. A $200 robot vacuum might be appealing, budget-wise, but limited suction and middling navigational capabilities mean that those work best for people who want light maintenance cleaning. That is to say, people with not that much to clean to begin with.

If, however, your robot vacuum is the only thing left standing between you and complete domestic chaos, the Connected offers the most functionality for the most reasonable price. It has features, like manual control, that far more extravagantly-priced models are missing. And any clunkiness aside, the Connected really cleans. After he's done, our floors look just as clear and dog-hair-free as if I’ve sweated over them with a push vacuum. In that most important respect, Mitchell has become a true friend.