About The Vacuum List
The Vacuum List holds 310 machines from 45 brands across 9 types — robots, cordless sticks, uprights, canisters, handhelds, hard floor washers and shop vacs — from $40 basics to $1,988 flagships. It was built because the headline number in this category cannot be compared at all, and almost every site that lists vacuums pretends otherwise.
The suction column cannot be sorted
Of the 310 machines here, 147 publish suction in pascals, 51 in air watts and 30 in plain watts, while the shop vacs quote horsepower or airflow in cubic feet per minute. Those are measurements of different things: pascals measure sealed pressure with the hose blocked, air watts combine pressure with airflow and describe rather more of what cleaning feels like, and motor watts describe electricity going in rather than dirt coming up. None converts into another without information the manufacturers do not publish. So the catalog records the unit each maker used and refuses to rank on the column, which is the only honest thing to do with it. 124 machines do not state a suction figure at all — an absence that says something in itself, since it clusters at the premium end where the marketing has moved on to brushroll design.
No stars anywhere on this site
Not one machine here carries a star rating. That is deliberate rather than an unfinished column. Vacuum review averages are dominated by first-month impressions, and the failures this category is known for — a brushroll that seizes on hair, a dock that jams, a battery that halves in year two, an app that loses a map it took three runs to build — arrive long after the review was posted. A four-point-four from twelve thousand reviews tells you a machine arrives working. The owner notes on each page are where the rest of it lives.
Three things sold as one word
Docks are where the marketing is loosest. Emptying the bin, washing the mop pad and washing it in hot water are three different capabilities that get sold under one “self-cleaning” banner, so they are held as three fields here; 155 machines empty themselves, and fewer do the rest. Navigation is the same story: “smart mapping” is printed on machines that build a floor plan with a laser and on machines that bounce off the furniture, so maker language is normalised into 4 navigation classes rather than repeated.
Where the numbers and the complaints come from
Specifications, dimensions, capacities and warranty terms come from manufacturer documentation. Prices are approximate snapshots in a category that discounts on a near-permanent basis, so they mark a tier rather than quoting a transaction, and a field no manufacturer publishes stays empty instead of acquiring a plausible figure. There is no test floor here, no lab, and no pile of machines in a garage. The pros, cons and owner insights on each model page are summarised from public owner discussion and long-term write-ups and are labelled as owner sentiment. A complaint earns a line when unconnected owners keep raising it — a dock the size of a bedside table, an app buried four menus deep, a robot that eats a phone charger once a week.
Who maintains it, and what it earns
Two people, working on it around other jobs. Neither of us is paid to do it and there is no office behind it. No vacuum brand pays for a listing, for a position, or for a kinder write-up, and none sees a page before it is published. The full methodology — every figure's source, how the lists are ordered, and how the site is funded — is set out on How we compare.
Discontinued machines stay listed
70 of the 310 machines are flagged as no longer sold new and are kept rather than deleted, because a superseded robot clearing at half price is often the best purchase on the page and deserves to be findable. Machines get added, prices re-checked and replacements flagged as they surface. A spec that disagrees with the manufacturer's current page is stale data here, not a placement anybody paid for.