I used this amazing robot vacuum and mop for a month — and my house has never been cleaner

Given the number of new models constantly hitting the market, it's hard to stand out as one of the best robot vacuums.

Ecovacs grabbed my attention with the expensive Deebot X8 Pro Omni, which offers an insane number of features and staggering cleaning performance. It's not just a robot vacuum that supplements manual cleaning; it can do the day-to-day cleaning and let you be the occasional supplemental cleaner.

Sure, it's expensive at $1,299 from the Ecovacs website, but if you're the type of person who truly hates cleaning but wants to live in a clean home, it's an investment worth considering.

Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni review: Price and availability

The Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni isn't a cheap robot by any means. Its full price is $1,299, though the company currently offers it for $1,169 as part of its launch promotion (which may not be happening when you read this). So, for our purposes, we will assume you'll need to pay the full price.

The flagship robot vacuum is now available on the Ecovacs website with free shipping. The price gets you the vacuum, the base and a vacuum bag, so all you need to do is add water and some cleaning solution to get started. You will need to replace the bag after a while, and Ecovacs sells a three-pack for $24.99. The cleaning solution sells for $47.48 for a two-pack, and the system is designed to use the optimal amount for cleaning.

Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni review: Design

The Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni comes in a hefty box and requires minimal work to get it up and running. Following the quick start guide, you'll be cleaning your floors in less than 15 minutes from opening the box.

The base looks attractive, albeit a little large, with its two water containers, ramp for the vacuum and all the internals. Large as it may be, it looks high-end and, depending on where you put it, will likely draw visitors' attention.

From the top, the robot looks like almost every robot vacuum you've encountered, though it's slightly lower at 3.9 inches, allowing it to fit under more furniture. It doesn't have a protruding dome on the top like many competitors, which lets it sit even flatter.

The round piece that covers the dust box just rests on the vacuum, and I wish it had a more secure locking mechanism to keep it in place when manually moving the vacuum around. It doesn't fall off during cleaning, but it seems like an odd design choice.

On the bottom, you can see the difference: the roller mopping pad, which is meant to clean more like a human and less like robot vacuums with flat mop pads.

The wheel design allows the vacuum to climb over uneven ground (I have significant bumps between the laminate flooring in my living room and the tile in the hallway) without too much effort.

Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni review: Performance and test results

We run every robot vacuum through various tests to ensure it's up to snuff. Outside of the day-to-day usage, we put the Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni in a five-by-five foot space with Cheerios, pet hair and kittie litter on both tile floor and carpet. We use 20g of Cheerios and kitty litter and 5g of pet hair to see what percent the vacuum sucks up and how much it leaves behind.

This vacuum did well with the larger items on the tile floor, scoring high on the Cheerios and kitty litter tests. It performed right around average for the pet hair test, pulling up 75% of the 5g of pet hair we laid down.

On carpet, the results were solid for cereal and kitty litter, but 70% of the pet hair is a little lower than I'd like to see from a high-end robot vacuum.

Based on average scores across carpet and hard floors, I can say it does a good job, but it's not the best robot vacuum we've ever tested. It could definitely stand to improve with pet hair performance, but it excelled in the kitty litter test on both carpet and hard floors.

Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni review: Mopping performance

I found the Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni to be a stellar mop. I'd argue that my floors have never been cleaner, as you'd never catch me mopping my house every day before I had this robot to do the dirty work. Sure, I clean up after spills and doggy accidents with paper towels and cleaning spray as they happen, but there's something to be said for a daily whole-home mopping.

With an eight-year-old child, two clumsy adults, a senior dog, two other dogs and two cats making messes, the Deebot X8 Pro Omni's mop portion received quite the workout. Nevertheless, it passed all the tests with flying colors.

Ice cream? No problem. Hot sauce? What hot sauce?! Even thick peanut butter was no match for this robot vacuum.

The base even cleans the mopping pad after each use (though you will need to do manual cleaning every few months, which the app will remind you about), so there's almost no intervention required on your part.

Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni review: App

The app is solid and does everything you could think of in terms of tweaking the settings for both the robot and its base. You can see and edit the map of your home, making it easy to manipulate it if something is off (shrinking or expanding a wall, adding a virtual boundary, etc.).

I found that it could be a little finicky with adjusting walls — I wanted to make a wall smaller, and it wouldn't let me for whatever reason — but it's not a deal-breaking issue as the vacuum still worked in the room fine, it just thought one side of my bed was a wall for some reason.

You can choose individual rooms to clean or just unleash the robot on your whole home. You can even draw a small area for it to clean if there is a spill.

Like everything in the tech space, an AI assistant can control the Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni. Using its wake word, you can tell it to clean a specific room with certain settings. It worked well enough, but I preferred just tapping on the app to customize how I wanted things cleaned.

Everything from pairing the robot to the app initially to using it on a daily basis seems well thought out, so I have no complaints about the app or the way it functions.

Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni review: Verdict

Overall, I really like the Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni robot vacuum and mop. Its cleaning performance in real-world scenarios is stellar, keeping my house cleaner than I ever have manually. Sure, like all robot vacuums, you'll need to do manual cleaning, but this does a good job of daily cleaning.

The only real knock against it is the scores on the pet hair in our test, but I have to say it does a good job of keeping my house free of pet hair (at least relative to how it was before this particular vacuum entered my life).

With all that said, the vacuum is expensive, so I expect stellar performance across the board, which it doesn't do in all of the tests.

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