Ecovacs Vacuums

Before it sold robots under its own name, Ecovacs built vacuums for other brands. Qian Dongqi founded it in Suzhou in 1998 as an OEM maker called TEK Electrical, rebranded it as a robotics company in late 2006, and had the first DEEBOT floor robots on sale by 2007. The company is listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and also owns Tineco, which makes its cordless sticks and floor washers. Every Ecovacs model listed here is a DEEBOT robot.

The N, T and X letters mark series, but on the models listed here they do not track price cleanly: the X8 Pro Omni at $683 costs less than the T80S Omni at $710. Hardware is the better guide. The N models, such as the N30 Pro Omni at $700 and the discontinued N20 Pro Plus, steer by laser alone with no camera. Most T models from the T50 Pro Omni at $400 up add a camera for obstacle recognition and a dock that washes the mop in hot water. The distinctive Ecovacs part is the OZMO roller mop, a cylinder that rinses itself as it turns, found on the X8 Pro Omni, T80S Omni, T90 Pro Omni and the X11 and X12 OmniCyclone; the T20 and T50 models use spinning pads instead. The OmniCyclone models replace the dust bag with a bagless cyclone bin, which Ecovacs says saves about 25 bags over five years on the X11.

Owners credit the roller mop with mopping in clean water for the whole run, and T80S, T90 Pro and X11 owners report pet hair coming up without wrapping the brush. The complaints are about everything around the cleaning. X2 Omni owners call the Ecovacs app the most complained-about vacuum app they know of, X9 Pro and T80S owners describe maps that need rebuilding, and T80, T50 Pro and T50 Max owners report slow or unhelpful warranty support. The onboard bins are small, 220 to 250 ml on most of the roller models, and X11 owners say damp debris cakes inside the bagless cyclone bin and needs scrubbing by hand.

Check thresholds before buying: T80S owners report it stops at about 20 mm and X11 owners at about 23 mm, so raised transitions can wall them off. Privacy is the other question. Security researchers showed at DEF CON 2024 that some Ecovacs robots could be used to record their owners over unsecured Bluetooth, and Ecovacs said it would not issue fixes for those flaws.