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The titleholder for most powerful robot vacuum evolves every six months or so as the top robot vacuum brands throw an elevated new flagship into the ring. For most of 2025, the suction power number to beat was 22,000 Pa (Pascals) — but in August 2025, the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller became the new apex robot vacuum with its 30,000 Pa of suction power (among other noteworthy upgrades).
Though I currently serve as president of the Roborock Saros 10R fan club, that vacuum has been out for nearly 10 months now. It was only a matter of time before a new darling came through my doors to upstage it as the best robot vacuum to buy right now, and on paper, the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller's specs are definitely superior. I've been testing it at home for a week and have some initial results to share with the class.
If we want to take the "looks" part of "first look" literally, the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller might just be the best-looking robot vacuum I've ever tested. My roommate, who is virtually unfazed by any new vacuum after the constant influx she's witnessed over the past three years of me turning our apartment into a testing lab, immediately noticed it. "Oh, THIS one is pretty."
Its crisp white and silver palette matches my landlord classic all-white apartment with a nod to our stainless steel appliances. The clean design is only to be rivaled by the Saros 10 that I tested earlier in 2025, which was pretty great, but still not as powerful as this Dreame model.
Is the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller good on carpet?
So far, the Aqua10 Ultra Roller has been a beast on both rugs and hard floors. If the 30,000 Pa of suction power benchmark doesn't mean much to you, here's a frame of reference: That's more than double the 13,000 Pa of suction power of the flagship Roomba with a roller mop, the 2025 Roomba Max 705 Combo.
Again, it's also notably stronger than the next-strongest vacuums on the market with 22,000 Pa, like the Roborock Saros Z70 with an arm, the Narwal Flow (also a roller mop robot vacuum), and the Dyson Vis Nav (which doesn't mop, self-empty, or avoid small obstacles). When you Google "most powerful robot vacuum," don't be fooled when those models come up — even AI hasn't caught up to Dreame's imminent takeover yet.
The Aqua10 Ultra Roller's strength has really translated to pet hair pickup, large crumb pickup, and even fine powder pickup across various rugs in my apartment. It fully cleared a mess I made on purpose on my plush Tumble fur rug involving crushed Goldfish crackers, spilled dry rice, and tough tufts of cat hair collected from the cat tree. I think the parallel spinning roller brushes underneath really help its efficacy on dry debris.
Even when I thought the Aqua10 Ultra Roller missed a few hairballs, it literally seemed to go back and grab the leftovers at the end of the session. Chances are high that it'll be bumped to the absolute best robot vacuum for carpet on my list.
Is the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller good at mopping?
A new question has quickly become the face of shopping for a robot vacuum and mop combo in late 2025: Are paintbrush-style roller mops better than spinning mopping pads? For the most part, I think the rumors are true: Roller mop robot vacuums are great at sopping up droplets and larger splatters without dragging spill remnants across the floor.
The Dreame Aqua10 Ultra rinses the roller mop with water from inside the vac in real time, ensuring that the fibers doing the "cleaning" aren't merely soaked in the juice or buffalo sauce that they just wiped up elsewhere. Of course, the self-emptying dock also self-washes the roller mop each time it returns to the dock. For mop washing mid-session, you can toggle a certain amount of time or square footage to elapse between trips back to the dock. Still, the live roller rinsing is a much-needed cushion against streaking.
In another purposeful disaster I created on the floor, the Aqua10 Ultra Roller tackled my wine spill and left the hardwood spotless in just one pass.
But as you may notice in these photos, there was another level in this kitchen cleaning test: shredded cheese. We go through bags of shredded cheese embarrassingly fast in my household, and there always seems to be new pieces of cheese lying under the counter, even if I just vacuumed the day before. To my surprise, the Aqua10 Ultra Roller left a lot of that shredded cheese behind — mere hours after it aced my cat hair test. The missed spots were all along edges, either along the wall or along the rug edge.
A lot of vacuums struggle with corner cleaning, not due to weak suction but due to the shape and reach of their edge brushes. I'm going to play around with settings in the Dreame app to try to right this — sending the robot vacuum for multiple passes, boosting suction power, and tweaking zone placement are all ways I've found to make a robot vacuum work better. Strategic tweaking of settings for sufficient corner cleaning probably shouldn't be a thing you have to do with a 2025 flagship robot vacuum, though.
So, it seems like there's something to be said for the flexibility of spinning pads vs. rollers. Not only do they scrub closer to the wall to grab more out-of-the-way droplets that I could see Dreame's roller missing, but those mopping pads' ability to scoot along edges is also handy for pushing dry debris out of corners into the vacuum's cleaning path.
(Next up on my testing docket: The new Dyson robot vacuum, the Spot+Scrub Ai, adopts the same roller mop technique — but the streets are saying it only has 18,000 Pa of suction power.)
Huge W: No phone chargers have been harmed so far
I never expect any robot vacuum to have 100 percent perfect small obstacle avoidance, even if it's one of the fanciest on the market. But even the high-end Roborocks that impressed me otherwise still consistently struggled with avoiding cords and phone chargers, even though they're spot on with other items like shoes and socks. So it's been really comforting to watch the Aqua10 Ultra Roller successfully dodge cords and cables on multiple occasions. From Halloween light extension cords on my living room floor to phone chargers that I throw in its path on purpose, I haven't had to yank anything from the Aqua10 Ultra Roller's jaws yet.
My next order of business is to see how it does around clumps of brown sugar or soil — the best makeshift pet waste.
It still can't climb stairs, but we're getting closer
Since the release of the X50 Ultra at CES in 2024, Dreame's main robotic vacuum claim to fame has its ProLeap system. That's the technology that originally stirred conversations about robot vacuums that can climb stairs, but the "stairs" in question could barely be more than two inches tall to be "climbable." That threshold has been bumped to 3.15 inches with the Aqua10 Ultra Roller, but that's still not really staircases.
For instance, my parents are currently adding a sunroom to their house, which will eventually be accessible from the living room via a sliding door (and maybe one shallow step down). The Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller would be one of the few robot vacuums that could safely scale that threshold and clean that room with the rest of the house without someone physically setting it in there. Every bedroom closet in my apartment has two large mirrored sliding doors, so it's nice to be able to send the Aqua10 Ultra Roller to sweep under my clothes without worry that it'll bust a wheel on the metal tracks. Still, it seems disrespectful to minimize the robust Aqua10 Ultra Roller to just a "stair climbing robot vacuum."
Eufy is trying to get in on the same climbing market with the Eufy Marswalker. However, it's not a standalone robot vacuum that can climb thresholds — it's a platform device that can take the Eufy Omni S2 robot vacuum up the stairs. That'll also be a 30,000 Pa robot vacuum, so pitting it against the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller will be fun when it comes out in January.
Is the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller worth it?
I would already recommend the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller robot vacuum to anyone who is open to splurging on their next vacuum purchase, especially for pet hair. Forget a robot vacuum with an arm that picks up socks sometimes — this is the practically-priced innovation I've been looking for in a premium robot vacuum.
If you've already purchased a high-end robotic vacuum in the past year or so, you're probably safe to skip this one. But if you're in the market and ruling out cheap robot vacuums, the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller is probably the best robot vacuum and mop out there right now — despite the lazy edge cleaning I've noticed in the first week.
For specs like 30,000 Pa of suction, the self-cleaning roller mop, and reliable small obstacle avoidance, its $1,599.99 MSRP is inarguably reasonable. Many weaker 2-in-1 robot vacuums have debuted around that same price over the past two years. But it's definitely worth noting that the Aqua10 Ultra Roller has been on sale for less than $1,300 for nearly the entire time since its release in August. While I still love the Roborock Saros 10R, its identical $1,599.99 price tag rarely gets a discount — and it has weaker suction power and less attentive cord and phone charger detection than the Aqua10 Ultra Roller.
Topics Reviews Robot Vacuums
Leah Stodart is a Philadelphia-based Senior Shopping Reporter at Mashable where she covers and tests essential home tech like vacuums and TVs, plus eco-friendly hacks. Her ever-evolving experience in these categories comes in clutch when making recommendations on how to spend your money during shopping holidays like Black Friday, which Leah has been covering for Mashable since 2017.
