The robo-revolution is here! Well, perhaps not yet, but robotic vacuums have definitely come a long way since the original domestic robots came out in 1996. More than twenty years later, we’ve got more choices than ever before, and a full 23% of vacuums sold today are robots. However, just because the market’s picked up doesn’t mean all the choices are good. There’s not much point in spending money on a model that simply gets stuck under your furniture instead of, you know, vacuums your home on your behalf. Who can you trust as a busy parent or young professional?

iRobot makes a pretty good argument to trust their engineers over the competition’s. Although their cheaper Roombas are rather simple minded, they’ve programmed some rather impressive brains into their higher end models as long as you’re willing to open your wallet. If you’re ready to spend $800, you’re going to get what just might be the best robotic vacuum on the market today, the iRobot Roomba 980 Robot Vacuum. It’s the upgraded version of the Roomba 960 and the most sophisticated Roomba in the line. Does it offer enough functionality to justify its price? We think so. Our full review is detailed below, and you can buy it here.

Pros, Cons, and Key Features of the iRobot Roomba 980 Robot Vacuum

Let’s be honest: you want the iRobot Roomba 980 because it’s the best automatic vacuum on the market. It’s going to clean your house by moving from one room to the next and it’s not going to get stuck while doing so. The Roomba 980 is the most advanced Roomba iRobot sells, and it simply has more artificial intelligence packed into it than the Roomba 890, 690, and 614 put together. We’d even rate it ahead of the 960, the second-most advanced Roomba. That’s not to say that the 960 isn’t a smart vacuum, because it is, but it still doesn’t shine quite as brightly as the 980 when you put them head to head. We’ll have more on that later.

For now, here are the key things to remember about the 980. you get Wi-Fi and smart phone compatibility, as well as the ability to receive orders from voice-activated systems like Amazon  Alexa and Google Assistant. It comes with a monster battery that lasts 100 minutes on a charge and is fully recharged within 3 hours at the included home base. You’ll need 3.6 inches or more of clearance for it to zoom beneath furniture and make it out alive, and it has a 14 inch-wide cleaning radius. On our scale, it clocks in at 8.7 pounds.

When you unbox it, you’ll first find the Roomba itself, presuming your UPS driver didn’t decide Christmas was coming early. You’ll also find the home base station that your Roomba will automatically bee-line back to when it needs a charge or when it’s done cleaning your home.

You’ll also find a virtual wall barrier to ward off certain rooms or areas, such as your mudroom, your cat and dog food and water bowls, or children’s toy area. You should also have a set of extra filters and side brushes, your instruction manual, and the same cheap one year warranty every robotic vacuum manufacturer thinks is good enough for these computers on wheels. Yes, that’s a pet peeve of ours, but we can’t hold it against iRobot exclusively, since everyone in the industry is doing it right now.

Wi-Fi and smart phone setup of the Roomba 980 app: How do you do it?

Setting up the 980 is essentially the same as the setup for the 960; it’s easy even if you aren’t a technology lover. You don’t need your smart phone or Wi-Fi to run the Roomba, but it’s much more convenient to have both set up, as they give you a wealth of information that you can choose to use or ignore. For example, you can program cleaning schedules, receive error and progress reports from the Roomba, check on battery charge, whether the cleaning bin is full or not, and much more. As with the 960, you get much more information from the 980’s app than you do from those supplied with simpler Roombas.

To set up Wi-Fi and your phone, first download the iRobot app via your Android or iPhone and install it. To sync the Roomba to your Wi-Fi, either send it to or physically place it at the docking station and make sure everything’s turned on; all devices should sync automatically.

How well does the Roomba 980 clean carpets, hardwood floors, and homes with cats and dogs?

In a word, well. Very well. The 980 includes Roomba’s most sophisticated navigation systems, and it shows. With cameras and a computer learning system inside it, the Roomba cleans in a grid instead of in the random and somewhat disorienting paths programmed into the lower Roombas. It reminds you of a human being cleaning, which is ultimately the goal. As a result, it takes much less time to clean a room (we’d estimate half as much time as that in the cheapest Roombas, the 690 and 614).

Due to its machine learning system, the 980 builds maps of your home to help it figure out more efficient paths in the future. It’s important to note that since the 980 uses cameras for mapping and navigation, it won’t work in complete darkness. Hopefully this is updated in the future.

For now, leave at least one light on or window open when programming jobs for times of day when you won’t be at home or awake. Like the 960, the 980 has multi-room functionality and will return to its home base to charge up when either low on battery or when it’s finished a job. If it still has work to do, it’ll return to clean more once the battery is recharged. Its safety features remain top notch and the 980 deftly turns around before falling off stairs or ledges.

Regarding its actual cleaning abilities, we’d estimate its power as slightly beyond that of the 980. It powers through bare floors, area rugs, and low-pile carpeting, although the latter reduces the battery life slightly. You can push it through medium-pile carpets and it’ll do a passable job with them, but it’ll drain battery life considerably; stick to a Miele canister (e.g., the Calima) for greater satisfaction there.

A unique feature to the 980 that comes in handy during cleaning jobs is an automatic power adjust that scales up power when moving to carpets and rugs and scales it back down when returning to bare floors (e.g., hardwood, laminate, tile, or concrete). It’s a small detail, but it helps preserve battery life, reduces noise levels, and gives the 980 a touch of extra power when needed.

As with every robotic cleaner, you’ll want to pick up shoes, socks, laces, cords, laundry, and other miscellaneous items up, or you’ll considerably lengthen the amount of time the 980 needs to clean a room, as it’ll navigate around most of these objects, but it’ll also add them to its mapping system, slowing it down.

Pet lovers will be particularly pleased with the 980. It does an impressive job picking up hair, dander, fur, and all kinds of other messes shedding cats and dogs leave behind them. Owners of golden retrievers, German shepherds, Labradors, collies, and beagles can win back the hours of their lives they’d ordinarily lose cleaning up after their professional shedding machines.

How does the Roomba 980 compare to the Roomba 960?

Compared to the 960, the 980 proves its value in a number of little ways that may or may not make the price difference worth it to you. For starters, it has a much, much longer battery life at 120 vs 75 minutes. However, if you’re fine with cleaning jobs taking a few hours longer while the 960 zooms back to home base to recharge before finishing a job, then the runtime difference might not matter that much.

Similarly, the automatic power adjust feature present in the 980 to use power more efficiently across surfaces is absent in the 960. While the navigational systems are the same in the 980 and 960, the 980 moves more efficiently and also has greater suction and sweeping power than the 980. You also get a number of advanced cleaning configurations you can program into the 980 through the app.

That said, while all of these additional goodies are worth talking about, they aren’t necessarily going to matter to everyone. We described the 960 as an excellent value and stand by that. If you don’t need the additional bells and whistles in the 980, you can save a bit of money with the 960.

Why buy the Roomba 980?

In conclusion, if you’re even looking at the Roomba 980, it’s because you want the best and don’t want to waste (any more) time with cheaper “smart” vacuums that spend more time bumping into walls than they do vacuuming your floors. While the 980 isn’t perfect, because no vacuum ever is, it is the best robotic vacuum you’re going to find on the market today. It has the brains to clean logically, the muscle to clean effectively, the battery to clean sustainably, and the connectivity to clean remotely and independently.

Our biggest pet peeve with it remains the one year warranty; at this stage, iRobot needs to start leading the industry in confidence in their little robots the way they led the industry in bringing them to the market to begin with. But we can’t hold the warranty length against the 980 itself. If you want a robotic vacuum, have nothing higher than low-pile carpets, and don’t want to bother pushing a hand-held or dragging a canister ever again on a daily or weekly basis, get the 980 and get those hours of your life back. You won’t regret it.

You can buy the Roomba 980 here on Amazon. Alternatively, you can buy the Roomba 960 here if you’re on a slightly smaller budget but want most of the same features.

Canadians can buy the Roomba 980 here or buy the Roomba 960 here instead.

If you find our research on PMC helpful, you can follow our efforts to keep maniacally reviewing home cleaning tools by shopping through our links above. We promise to keep fighting the good fight against every horror children, animals, and grown, yet messy humans can inflict upon a clean home.