Customer Ratings & Reviews

I like this unit because it does not have a huge dock. It can hide it under the couch so its only seen when its needed. The suction could be better but this works for the inbetween times the real vacuum comes out

We love her! We named her Hope! She does a great job cleaning. The initial set up took some time and had difficulties connecting with our wi/fi, but that could be a human error issue

Mapped out the room and vacuumed. Did a great job of getting every inch mapped.

Roomba’s are very good and durable. Battery life is another plus.

I love it and it does a great job at getting my cat hair but does not do well with elevation. Very intense to get caught on a chair and stuck until the battery dies.

So far, I really like the Roomba 205. It is quieter and cleans corners better than my old Neato. I did not like that I had to operate it from an app on my phone, but my son helped me get the app and figure it out.

This little robot does an amazing job. My carpenting has never looked so nice. There is not even a smidge of dust on my hard wood floor in the kitchen. Thank you

Great machine does what its supposed to do and is surprisingly quiet. The wife loves it and thats all that matters!!

So far working good . It has several options for cleaning . Strong suction

we have only used it once but do like it--just need to figure out how to set up the pathway.

Love this! Easy to set up and cleans well! I highly recommend this Roomba

I prefer the roomba sweeper than the combo. I tried the combo and it stopped working after 2 months. The sweeper is the way to go.

so quiet! love it! replaced my older generation irobot with this model and very impressed!

Had an old roomba, and this one is way better. Can run more with the compactor. Spinning sweeper does fall off sometimes so they need to tighten that up. Good work and the new roomba has a better brain.

The last time I had a Roomba, it was a dumb, crash and bash type with no lidar or vision. It was such a chore to use and cleaned so poorly that eventually I just stopped using it and instead found it was easier to just manually vacuum the floor. The 205 is a vast improvement. It’s smart enough that it won’t go where it shouldn’t and will clean without being babysat. It fulfills the promise a robot vac, that it will take a chore off my plate and allow me to do something else with my time. Setup and getting the Roomba connected to Wi-Fi was easy with the Android app. The app UI doesn’t impress, but it’s easy enough to use once you familiarize yourself with the workflow, and I found that it’s quite feature-rich. Robot status, health of the consumables, mapping, routines, cleaning history (with actual cleaning path info per job), and issuing commands are all available via the app. Room mapping is mostly accurate, especially considering that my living room is somewhat cluttered and cramped. It splits up a room into separate rooms seemingly arbitrarily, but these “rooms” can be easily merged into one. Creating no-go zones is really easy in the app. My last Roomba required virtual wall devices, so this, again, is a vastly improved experience. The 205 is very conservative about avoiding a zone, so it took a bit of trial and error to get the zones drawn to my liking. The normal clean setting is mostly sufficient for my hard floor that gets covered with dust and dog fur daily, but it doesn’t beat a decent modern cordless stick vac. I don’t mind though. For daily cleaning, it’s enough. On this setting, it cleans my small living room in about 15-20 minutes and consumes about 30-40% of the battery. I haven’t had this vac long enough to find the limits of the compactor feature, but I do appreciate that this vac can go longer between emptyings without needing an emptying dock. My living space is too cramped for one. The combination of the absence of the trash can dock and the lidar being tucked under the hood means I can dock the robot under my couch. That is actually a bigger deal than I thought it would be. It also means it can clean under my couch--also a bigger deal. Sadly, it appears that “obstacle avoidance” is practically limited to seeing furniture, despite the 205 having lidar, so I still need to make sure the room is clear of anything that can get trapped in the roller or stop the robot it its tracks. It will eat cords, it will climb onto shoes, and it will bring about the poopocalypse. (Dog owners, set routines with caution.) This limitation makes this model best suited for partially unsupervised use. Given the run time for my situation, this model is perfect for vacuuming while I make coffee or wash the dishes. I’m close enough to know if it gets into trouble, and by the time I’m done with my task, the robot is just about returning to its dock. I do have one complaint. The app and instructions gave no guidance on adding maps for different floors. The map creation screen says that you need to have the Roomba docked and to make sure you allow it to return to the dock once mapping is completed, but how are you to follow these instructions when there’s no dock on a second floor? In the end, I tried just manually placing the Roomba in the area I wanted to map, and it then smartly treated that placement as the starting position. At the end of the map creation, it returned to the starting position as if it was docking. I then picked up the Roomba and placed it in front of the dock to find it and return home. In closing, I found this robot vac to be a great tool for reducing my workload. It actually gets the job done with easy setup and minimal supervision. Is the 205 worth it? To me, sure, especially when I compare 2025 dollars to what I paid for my first Roomba that was pretty much trash out of the box. The 205 is 90% within reach of being a set-and-forget vac, and the compactor means extended emptying intervals without needing a big, ugly self-emptying dock that my living room cannot accommodate. However, is it the best value? I’m not entirely sure the 205 offers enough for the price to counter the market forces now at play. The competition in this space has gotten fierce, and all these vac makers are just trading solid blows, with iRobot now getting sent to the corner on price in an appliance segment that they created and owned. So the 205 is maybe not the best but a good value, and if you want more dust capacity without the big dock, for now the 205 is the only one out there.

I've used Roombas for years, and have generally been very impressed by each new model that comes out. Unfortunately over the years this has resulted in a bit of feature bloat, with each one getting steadily more intimidating and complicated to set up. The 205 feels in some way like the company hitting reset and getting back to basics in a way that doesn't require them to completely drop all the enhancements they've made with a new app, new brushes, and a clever new compactor system. It's an intriguing product that I'll admit I really hoped would win me over, but after spending a week with it I'm both impressed and frustrated in equal measure. First, let's talk about the good points for the vacuum (and there are a lot.) The last few generations of Roombas have felt like they were making fairly minor changes to an established formula, but the 205 has been retooled practically from the ground up. The distinctive dual roller brush system has been swapped out for a more maintenance friendly single rubber brush. The LIDAR system has dropped inside the robot's body. The near ubiquitous self-emptying tower dock has been replaced by an enlarged dustbin that claims to be able to go over a month before needing to be emptied. And the entire chassis has been enlarged. While I was initially skeptical about some of this I have to say that most of the design tweaks are good ones. The new brush design is still very adept at picking up dust, grime, and pet hair. The LIDAR system is remarkably capable and very well protected, allowing for some of the best navigation I've ever seen from a Roomba. And the dust bin, while a little weird, does seem to do its job and push most of what it picks up into the back, leaving the front of the bin essentially clear for the next cleaning job. Getting it set up was very painless, mapping was completed in less than ten minutes, and overall cleaning performance is excellent. Unfortunately, there are a lot of choices I find harder to understand. The first spot I began running into problems was with the charging dock. It's small, which is nice for aesthetics, but also lightweight to the point of being a problem. When I first set it up the robot was constantly knocking its own base around trying to come in to dock, and the little friction pads on the bottom did nothing to stop it. Eventually I found myself having to erect a small structure around it to brace it, at which point it worked quite well. At this point I began to notice another surprise: the battery life is a lot shorter than I've come to expect. I have it set up to run a routine covering roughly 700 square feet of mixed carpet and tile flooring, and I've never once seen it be able to get through it all without having to go back to the dock to charge several times. This tends to stretch cleaning out several hours, which was very much a surprise. To be fair it is quite smart about how it breaks the job up between various rooms, and the navigation is accurate enough for it to optimize the path it takes, but unless you're willing to crank down the vacuum level to the lowest setting it does kind of feel like it's always running. This is somewhat exacerbated too by the fact that the new simplified app lacks one of the better features of the old one: the ability to set up quiet times where the Roomba isn't allowed to resume a job. I don't know that the feature is completely gone as it does seem to avoid turning itself on during dinner, but having that extra bit of granular control was very useful and would have greatly helped in my attempts to optimize the cleaning schedule to make sure it actually had a chance of finishing. I'm also a little concerned about how long the dust compactor can actually extend cleaning time given that it's compacting dust directly over the vacuum filter, but admittedly I haven't seen it cause any problems so far. Now to be clear this doesn't make it a bad vacuum. In fact I'd go so far as to say that for most people, this will fulfill their needs and is a great pick. But I'm not sure it's one I'd necessarily recommend owners of existing Roombas run out to grab as an upgrade. Hopefully some future software updates can smooth over some of the quirks but, for now, it feels very much like a lot of these ideas could stand a little more refinement before they become must-have features.

This is great. If you want a Roomba that's not necessarily entry level, but not something that's super expensive in top of the line. It's the perfect mid-range

I bought this to replace my old roomba that lasted me 7 years. Perfect for using on hard surface and carpet. Picks up cat litter and pet har easily! The mapping feature is also awesome - that way I can run the rooms that have more traffic!

Great robot. This thing vacuums better than I ever could

Easy set up. Pattern is efficient. Saves a bunch of time not vaccuuming.