First, the number on the box
Suction is advertised in pascals, and the figure has climbed past 20,000 Pa across the industry. Treat it as marketing. It is measured at the intake under ideal conditions, not at the floor through a brush head, and it does not survive contact with carpet pile. Independent testing consistently finds that brush design, the seal between the robot and the floor, and how the machine handles hair matter more than the headline pressure.
The practical consequence: a mid-range model and a flagship from the same generation usually clean bare floors indistinguishably. You are not paying for suction. You are paying for the dock.
What you are actually buying
The robot is the cheap part of the system now. The base station is where the money goes and where the daily experience is decided.
Self-emptying
The single feature with the largest effect on whether you keep using the thing. Without it you empty a small bin every run or two. With it, roughly every couple of months.
Mop washing and drying
The dock rinses the mop pads and then blows them dry with warm air. The drying is not a luxury. A damp pad parked in a warm dock develops a smell within days, and that smell is the most common complaint about mopping robots that lack it.
Hot water washing
Higher tiers wash pads in heated water, which lifts grease that cold rinsing leaves behind. Worth it in a kitchen, largely irrelevant elsewhere.
Plumbed or refilled
Top docks can connect to a water line and a drain, removing the last manual task. This requires a plumbing point where the dock lives, which most homes do not have where they want the dock.
The three questions that pick the model
Picks
Full-dock robots carry a list price most people should never pay. This category discounts hard and often, so the practical advice is to buy a well-reviewed machine while it is heavily reduced rather than to buy the newest one at list. Every pick below was selected on that basis: a deep current discount, a rating above four stars, and enough reviews for the rating to mean something. Anything that failed one of those three tests is not here, however good the marketing.
The first three are full-dock machines and are close enough that the discount on the day should decide between them. The last two are for homes where a full dock is the wrong shape of answer.
Current picks
eufy C28 Omni
A full-dock machine doing everything that matters: self-emptying, automatic mop washing and drying, and a roller mop that cleans itself continuously rather than dragging a loading pad across the floor. It is the direct successor to the X10 Pro Omni below, which is the reason that older model is now discounted so steeply.
It carries the largest discount of any well-reviewed robot in the category at the time of writing, which is what puts it at the top rather than any claim that it is the most capable machine made.
eufy X10 Pro Omni
The previous generation, and the better buy if the discount on it is deeper on the day you look. It has the feature that matters most on mixed floors, mop pads that lift clear of carpet automatically, plus self-emptying and self-refilling. It has also been on sale long enough to have accumulated a very large review base, which makes its rating more trustworthy than a newer model's.
Compare the two on the day. They are close enough that the discount should decide it.
Roborock Qrevo QV 35A
We are not going to pretend one brand wins because a page is titled after it. Roborock's Qrevo line sits at the same tier as the eufy machines above, and independent testing regularly places them within a hair of each other on cleaning performance. What separates them on any given week is the discount.
The QV 35A is the one to put alongside the picks above: all-in-one dock with automatic mop washing, anti-tangle brushes, and spinning mop pads rather than a dragged flat pad. It is the model in the line where the dock features stop being cut, and it carries the best rating-to-review-base ratio of any Roborock currently discounted on Amazon.ca.
Roborock's real advantage is further up the range, where its retractable navigation module clears furniture that stops every turret-topped robot. If low furniture is your actual problem, look at the Saros line instead and accept a smaller discount.
If the full dock is more machine than you need
eufy Omni C20
The same self-emptying and automatic mop washing and drying as the picks above, in a chassis low enough to clear furniture that stops taller robots. It gives up hot-water washing and the roller mop, which are the two features you are paying the top-tier premium for.
It is the sensible answer for a mostly hard-floor home where mopping is a weekly tidy rather than the main job. It also has by far the largest review base of the full-dock machines here, which makes its rating the most trustworthy number on this page.
eufy 11S MAX
No dock, no mop, no map, no app worth using. It is a puck that bumps around the floor on a schedule and picks up what is on it, and it has been doing that unchanged for long enough to accumulate a review base an order of magnitude larger than anything else on this page.
Buy it for one of three situations: a small flat where a full dock has nowhere to live, a second floor where you do not want to carry the good robot up and down, or a first robot where you are not yet sure you will use one. It is thin enough to go under most furniture, which is the one specification where it beats machines costing several times more.
It will not replace a vacuum. Nothing at this tier does. What it does is keep the floor from ever getting bad enough to need one urgently.
The ongoing cost nobody puts on the box
These are consumable machines. Dust bags, filters, side brushes, main brushes and mop pads all wear and are replaced on a schedule. Over a few years the consumables add up to a meaningful fraction of the purchase price.
Before buying, search for the replacement parts for the specific model on a Canadian retailer. If the parts for a model are only available through grey-market sellers or on long shipping timelines, that is a reason to choose a different model, and it is the most common way a cheap robot vacuum turns out not to have been cheap. This applies with particular force to models that have just been superseded, where discounting looks attractive precisely because the line is ending.
Two things worth knowing before you put one in your house. These machines build and store a map of your home's interior and the higher tiers carry cameras, with footage and mapping data processed through a manufacturer account. Decide whether you are comfortable with that, and check whether the model offers a genuine offline or local mode before assuming it has one. Separately, a robot vacuum is a legitimate assistive device for anyone who cannot push an upright, and is one of the few in that role that carries no medical stigma at all.