Customer Ratings & Reviews

It's only an assistant. You'll still need to vacuum yourself if you want a clean house.

Discovering Roomba for the first time has been eye-opening. This 205 model I tried boasts an onboard mechanical compactor that holds debris for up to 60 days—no bulky dock required. This was very important to me as my house is small and crowded and not possible for a dedicated dock to take up precious space. The Roomba’s three-stage cleaning system delivers 70× more power-lifting suction than prior models and uses a multi-surface rubber brush plus a corner sweeper to capture crumbs, pet hair, and dust bunnies alike. LiDAR mapping feels futuristic, guiding the robot in neat rows around furniture, even in the dark. The initial mapping of my home was very quick, a lot faster than a different brand I had used in the past. The mapping was also accurate without any issues. I effortlessly scheduled cleanings from the intuitive app, setting zones to target high-traffic areas or skip empty rooms. The Roomba’s battery lasts over three hours before automatically recharging and resuming where it left off. At under a foot tall, its sleek design blends seamlessly with home decor and tucks neatly under couches. As someone new to the Roomba brand, I’m impressed by how this compact powerhouse simplifies daily floor care, saving time and maintaining clean floors without hassle. I no longer have to trot out my heavy vacuum and do weakly cleanings now that I have the Roomba.

Very easy to use. Excellent coverage of our tile floors.

I wish I had bought this earlier. This has been a game changer for the dog hair to be manageable.

I enjoy this product it makes my life so much easier!

Don't waste your time. This thing quit working after about a week. After reading some troubleshooting help, I got it working again. I did a GREAT job....for about a month. Then it just stopped working again. The app said there was an update but it couldn't connect to the network. After an exhausting hour or so trying to get it to reconnect, it just locked up. The lights on top are on, but it won't do anything. I even tried a factory reset, but it won't even let me do that. iRobot customer service is the textbook definition of "useless". The virtual assistant keeps saying "I can't find an answer for that" (no matter what I ask it), and you can't talk to a human to save your life. $300 paper weight is all I have, and they apparently don't stand behind their product, because they won't even talk to you. Save your money, you have been warned.

I purchased this vacuum because I wanted to get away from the huge charging base that our present vacuum needs. This one came defective from the factory. Not very good quality control at all. Everything went well as far as setup goes. The vacuum would not move off the charging base at all after 6 hours of charging. It stopped as soon as it disconnected from the charging post. Obviously, I will be returning it to Best Buy.

Worked fine, mapping feature wasn’t the best. A little pricey for what it is compared to others

I highly do not recommend this robot. It constantly gets lost. The side brush is always coming off. The cleaning performance is not that good. Irobot really took a step backwards when coming out with this new line of Roomba they took away the dual brushes the dirt detect and a whole bunch of other features. I would highly recommend getting an older model over this model. Yeah the lidar navigation is cool and I think it works better because you can run the unit at night but it’s still constantly getting lost and can’t find its way back home. The dust compactor is pretty cool. Don’t get me wrong but very difficult to clean because once you pull the bin open. A big plume of dust goes everywhere. I would probably stick with the J9 plus I plan on returning this unit and getting the new 705 max and hoping that one performs better

I was so disappointed in this purchase. The app is horrible and customer service was worse. After two phone calls and sending pictures and model number/ serial number etc, I was promised an escalation call within 48 hours. I could not get the unit to complete the initial mapping at first and then I closed all my doors and only had it map a small area. Still would not clean. After waiting for five days for help, I returned the unit to Best Buy and bought a Shark which has worked incredibly well. iRobot customer service finally emailed me after almost a week. The rep who reached out was good and apologetic and promised to look into how they did not follow up with me.

The iRobot - Roomba 205 DustCompactor Robot Vacuum increases the amount of dirt and dust it can hold with it’s new compacting feature. With this new feature, you don’t have to empty the bin after or before it use. It seems to hold the dirt and dust for weeks of use! The suction and brush action is very optimized. Having 3 big dogs, I honestly cannot live without the iRobot - Roomba 205 DustCompactor Robot Vacuum. The dogs don’t wipe their feet outside before they come in, so tracks dirt and mud (on rainy days) in and expect me to clean it 😊 With the iRobot - Roomba 205 DustCompactor Robot Vacuum, it’s my cleaning companion. The noise is not overly loud, definitely a lot quieter than your standard vacuum cleaner. Downloading the app connecting to it, you can start it when you are not home. Initial setup, it maps the cleaning area using a lidar laser. Which means it’s better than the ones that use just a bump and turn style. It sits a little higher than other robot vacuum cleaners, so it might not clear under some furniture. The dust bin is bigger than most robot vacuum cleaners, it has a paddle that goes from side to side to compact the dust and dirt. It also has a mopping, that like previous models, is like using a wet wipe on the floor. The compacting dust bin, I wouldn’t say it’s a game changer, but it is an evolution. It really is just nice to not have to empty the bin after or before each cleaning session.

Do not buy. The first one failed and had to be replaced. About 6 weeks later, the second one failed for the same reason. Tech support from Roomba is not helpful at all and is difficult to reach. Now I'm beyond the return period with Best Buy and stuck with a non-working vacuum. Not Best Buy's issue but don't buy a Roomba

The iRobot - Roomba 205 DustCompactor Robot Vacuum - Black is one of the latest robot cleaners from iRobot. I have been using robot cleaners for about the last 5 years in my house, my daughter’s house, and my daughter’s store. During that time, they robots have gone from marginally useful to almost essential devices, with improvement in routing and Lidar object detection, more functionality, and greater suction ability. The Roomba 205 further improves in these areas and also provides onboard compaction so that the robot can be run for several months without emptying. The Roomba 205 is easy to setup and operate. Just download the App, setup and charge the robot per instructions in the app, and you are good to go. The charging station must be placed on a hard surface with the back of the unit against a wall or other vertical surface. Because the charging station is very small and light (unlike some vacuum docking stations that I have used), it is more sensitive to positioning and surface. In operation, the robot is quiet and can effectively clean both floors and rugs. When it is done or needs a charge, the robot returns to its small base station. I highly recommend the Roomba 205 to anyone looking for an effective and easy to use robot vacuum cleaner.

I was super interested in this new vacuum from Roomba because I was looking for something that came in a compact formfactor but was able to handle dust and hair for longer periods of time without my intervention. I was especially interested in the new Dust Compactor since previous robot vacuums had struggled with the resulting volume of hair which gets sucked into their self-emptying stations and often trigger a “full” notification and require the bag to be changed. The 205 DustCompactor, as the name implies features a dust bin that compacts, rather than emptying into a docking station. After using this vacuum over the past several weeks I have walked away with several impressions: - The Roomba navigation is logical and top notch covering the perimeter and middle of each of the rooms. The navigation has so far been repeatable and reliable. - The app and status of the robot is lacking in my setup. Sometimes the status and location of the robots isn’t clear or lags substantially. This may be due to the fact that I have multiple access points in my home and the robot is disconnecting from one and reconnection to another which causes the delay. The robot seems to update when it wants and when updating there is no progress bar or anything indicating when it might be done, just telling me if it doesn’t become available after a certain period of time that I should intervene and restart it. I assume typically the updates shouldn’t affect the user experience, but I would like the ability to select a preferred update time window. - Does well with dog and human hair, but hair still gets caught inside the roller and it isn’t clear if that will cause issues later. I have Great Pyrenees which are exceptionally hairy, so this might only be a concern if you have comparatively hairy dogs. - It is VERY quiet but very effective and picked up almost all the visible dust and hair on its first run in my living room. It does get louder on carpet as it adjusts its suction, but you could easily run it at night with your bedroom door closed and never know that it ran. - Room editing tools work well for defining zones and “no-go” areas. Trivial to make changes and get everything setup. - A small critique for a small detail, but the battery terminals do not match up with the robot when the robot is pushed all the way forward on the dock. You should place the robot on the dock and back it up half an inch or so until you see the lights come on. I had placed the robot manually on the dock only to come back a week later and realize that it had died and that I hadn’t actually placed it on the charger. When it docks automatically this isn’t a problem. Overall, I have been impressed with this novel take in the robot vacuum cleaner space. After having this unit for a month I still have not had to empty the unit so the dust compactor features seems to be working wonderfully especially on something like hair that would usually take up a large volume. It’s a very cool idea and I’m glad to see them trying new and different approaches in what has become a mostly iterative category.

we are absolutely loving having the IRobot Roomba 205 Dust compactor robot vacuum as a part of our office cleaning schedule. it was pretty easy to set up. although I had to do a full factory reset from the very beginning. the App makes it very simple to know where you are in the set up process. once I had it set up it asked me to create a map. It took about 15 minutes to create a whole map of my office. I have 4 regular rooms, a hall way and 2 bathrooms and it caught everything. I was then able to set it to clean. It did a great job on its first clean. where I live there is a LOT of fine dust that covers everything and anything. This makes sweeping really hard. The robot was able to clean the whole office and still have space add more dust in the bin. All in All I would definitely get this robot again if I was looking for a vacuum only robot.it was easy to set up and easy to use. light weight and able to fit in small places! I am still trying to find the right schedule for everyone with the noise

I’ve owned many robot vacuums and feel they are a necessity for me especially when you have cats. I don’t have complaints but always procrastinate when it’s time to empty the debris collection chamber by the charging station. With this roomba 205 dustcompactor you now don’t have to worry about it for up to 60 days. There is a new feature where debris is compacted and allows more to be stored inside. That is a huge plus for me. Now as far as the roomba itself, it is very well constructed with an incredibly well made app. Easy to set up on your WiFi. Cleaning is what you would expect from this great company., and the 205 does disappoint at all. Battery life is also extended and lasts for a very long time. Noise is about the same is my other roomba, not bad really and cats do not get scared of it. Really my favorite part remains the app. You can control so much and it’s so easy to use. So ye this is a great purchase at a cheaper price point then a lot of competitors and well worth the investment.

Did not like it. It seemed like it would get confused and kept just driving around

I'm coming from an older, cheaper, dumber Roomba and I'm pretty happy, but there's one major caveat. The Roomba 205 is a pretty standard robo-vac, that has some nice features for the price. This one comes with a built-in lidar sensor which should (and does) make mapping and cleaning your home much faster and more accurate. It also has a very large bin that compacts the dirt, dust, and other junk it picks up on its little cleaning journeys. Setup and operation are all done through the newer Roomba home app (more on that later). Assembly is quick and easy ... then there's the setup So out of the box you get your little docking/charging base, power cable, robot vac, replacement filter, and edge cleaning brush. Getting the Roomba ready to go took no time at all. It literally took me more time to get everything out of the box and unwrapped than it did to get the base connected and robot situated. My unit came with some cosmetic defects on the surface - scratches, smudges, and what looked like a water stain (more in a sec). Anyway it was plugged in, charging and ready to go! So moving on to the setup. Setup was agony. I could not get this thing to work for hours. Once the robot was on the dock I let it charge for 6 hours. Pushing the home and power buttons did nothing. I could not get the thing to power on. Maybe the battery was completely depleted, I don't know. It's supposed to ship with a 40% charge and mine was shipped directly from the manufacturer so /shrug. I kept waiting and kept coming back and still nothing. Eventually I got on a call with customer support and they walked me through a bunch of steps that yielded the same results. Nothing. Around the 45 minute mark on the phone the customer service rep asked me to pick up the robot to take more pictures as we were going through the laborious steps of getting a support ticket going. A few seconds after I put the robot back down it played a loud sound and said "charging". Finally, but why wasn't it responding to any input commands from the two buttons? No idea. Thus ended my customer service call. In case you were wondering what customer service said about the obvious damage (documented with pictures) on the top of the Roomba, their response was "we're sorry but that damage isn't eligible for replacement". That's absolute garbage. The bare minimum a company should be able to guarantee is a product free from defect out of the box, but I guess that's too tall an order for Roomba. Moving on ... Setup wasn't smooth. I first tried to add the Roomba from the app I used on my old model, but it told me I can only control it with the new app. No problem, it automatically opened the play store to the download page and in a few seconds I was good to go (but not really). I followed the instructions in app up to the point where I was connecting to my home network and the setup failed. No explanation just a "something went wrong" message with a number attached. Tried again and no dice so I tried to find the error code which led me to - nothing. Nothing whatsoever. I tried a third time. A fourth time. And on the fifth attempt a new error message popped up saying something like "your Roomba is only compatible with 2.4ghz wireless networks". A lead! Great! So I try to select that network from the app. Error. I try again. Error. Doing a big sigh I opened up my router's settings on my phone and was reminded that this router combines the 2.4 and 5ghz bands into one, handling the assignment of devices on its own. No problem, I'll just split the bands and ... oh wait. Can't do that on this router apparently. So I bang my head against the wall, metaphorically, for awhile. I try to disable the 5ghz and 6e bands to force it to connect. Nah. Error. I try renaming the different bands and connecting that way and nah. Error. I try hiding the broadcast SSIDs for the incompatible bands. Nah. Finally I decided to forget all networks on my phone, restart my router with only the 2.4ghz band active, connect my phone to that, and try again. Voila! That does the trick. After this setup completed. Almost. The very last step for setup is to completely power off the Roomba, then "wake it up" by placing it on the dock. I was very leery about this after the difficulty I had getting the thing to turn on in the first place and wouldn't you know it? It wouldn't power on! I reseated the Roomba a few times and gave up. I held the power button and it popped right back to life. Horrible setup experience. Oh and the battery was a very healthy 85% after 10ish hours on the dock so it probably was shipped dead from warehouse. Not a great first impression. Next we get to the actual function and performance of the robot. I keep mine docked in our living room which has a bunch of furniture in it, maybe not the ideal setup, but mapping went very smoothly. It zoomed around the living room for a bit, stopped here and there then moved on to the next room. Mapping took less than 10 minutes. So far I'm happy with the performance. Once it returned to the dock I picked up a bunch of stuff from the floor to provide a clear path for the Roomba, waited for it to get a little more charge, then sent it on a full cleaning run for its first time out. Immediately ran into a problem where the Roomba would suck up the edges of the throw rug in the living room. Got caught on one of the tassels and I had to go help it out. I decided to tuck the tassels under the edge of the rug as a stopgap and that seemed to do the trick (for now). After that it ran perfectly. I could watch the cleaning map update the position of the Roomba in real time. Pretty cool. It was obvious that it was doing a much better, much more thorough, much faster job than my old bump-into-everything model. Unfortunately 80+% battery was insufficient juice for the thing to do a complete cleaning run. No worries, it returned back to the dock to charge. Very slowly. It became obvious that it wasn't going to be ready to vacuum for hours and hours so I ended the job in the app and started returning the various odds and ends I'd picked up in the rooms it had completed (kitchen and living room). After another 5 hours or so it was in the 90% range so I sent it out, one room at a time, to complete the rest of the floor. Only this time there was no real time tracking of the Roomba. The app just showed me a blank map. No other information. It did the same thing for the next room. In fact, out of the four "jobs" I had the Roomba do on the first day, only the mapping run and the first two rooms it was able to complete before the battery drained displayed the real time cleaning map. Bummer. The app also didn't save those jobs in history, so it looked like I'd only done the mapping run and the two room clean. Strange. This brings me to the app. There are a lot of features in the app. Features you'll love. You can add exclusion zones where you don't want the Roomba to vacuum. You can add special cleaning zones for high traffic areas so you don't have to clean the whole room. You can split rooms apart, or join multiple detected rooms together. It's great! But none of it works. I was able to create a custom cleaning zone, but the Roomba refused to vacuum it. It just drove around up to the location, then said "cleaning failed" and returned to the dock. I tried this multiple times and it never worked. So I decided to delete that cleaning zone except wait, I cant! Every time I tried to delete it the app would "think" for 30+ seconds then return an error. I tried to delete it the following day and it worked. Alright that's good I guess, but strange. The second day I started doing one room runs to see how it would do again. I was able to turn down the suction settings, a feature that thankfully works, for the living room which prevented it from sucking up and folding over the rug. It ran in there without issue, AND I was provided with a real time map once again. Nice. I continued on to every other room and it performed as expected. Quick, efficient pathing, thorough cleaning. However the battery life on this thing. The robot seems to tap out after cleaning 60sq ft or so which seems odd. The older, dumber, Roomba would run for much longer, and clean a much larger area before needing to recharge. I think something may be wrong with the battery or maybe this model simply uses that much more power. I think it's probably the latter, as this does seem to have much stronger suction, the previous model never came close to sucking up and folding over the throw rug. So that's good I think. The actual performance of the vacuum seems great, but it's severely limited by a very buggy app. Overall thoughts: This vacuum could be amazing, and maybe one day it will be, but right now the "new" Roomba home app is so bad that it dramatically limits the performance of this thing. Setup was painful, sucking up hours of my time for a process that should've taken no more than 20 minutes. I essentially spent an entire day getting this thing up and running. When the app doesn't return an error this thing is great. The cleaning is quick and accurate. Coverage is perfect. Doing a deep clean in the kitchen gave wall to wall coverage along one axis then the other. No complaints there. Being able to turn down the suction to avoid issues like with that living room rug, or max it out for problem areas, is a nice touch and I'm very glad that it worked. Unfortunately sometimes the app seems like it doesn't know what you asked it to do, or maybe just refuses to do it. The app needs a lot of work, and if it improves significantly this will be an amazing product. Right now they've only got 50% of the equation locked down, the hardware. That's an F. This is far from the kind of set it and forget it cleaning that most people are looking for. It could be, but right now it's not.

The iRobot - Roomba 205 DustCompactor Robot Vacuum – Black is an advancement from previous iRobot models with its built in compactor to lessen the need for daily dumping. First, I downloaded the iRoomba app on my phone. Then I plugged in the charger base to set the iRoomba on for charging. I was easily directed how to set up the Internet connection. With Internet connected, I could begin mapping my home. The Roomba 205 has LIDAR that helps navigation around my home. The Roomba 205 operates fairly quietly. The suction is just as strong a bigger standing vacuum cleaner. The Roomba 205 is very efficient at picking up all the dirt and/or dust on the floors and returns back to its charging station. I have only had the Roomba 205 for almost a week and I appreciate its new technology making my home maintain clean floors on a schedule with the iRoomba app. I do not need to empty the compactor yet. In my final analysis, maintenance is simple, the app controls the functions and is no problem to use, and the iRobot - Roomba 205 DustCompactor Robot Vacuum – Black has made keeping my floors clean with no real effort on my part.

She stops at 6 inches from every wall doesn’t go around furniture very well and makes my house into 20 rooms instead of nine. She’s stupid.