Eufy’s robotic vacuums have always felt decent to me, but never great. I wouldn’t call the Eufy Robot Vacuum Omni E28 great, either, but I would call it one of Eufy’s best robot vacuums, thanks to some gimmicky features that actually work well, fun beta ones that don’t, and broad smart home support via the Matter protocol. It’s held back, though, by hellacious noise, unimpressive mopping, and the leakiness of its otherwise handy “deep clean” wet vac module.

Mostly, all I want out of a robot vacuum is for it to do its thing quietly without me babysitting it, and for it to leave no treats for my feet to pick up. No robot vacuum nails this, but some, like the Matic I recently reviewed, do get close. The Omni E28 isn’t quite as close as that, but if the Matic’s limitations—its ongoing costs and the fact it can’t go under a lot of furniture—make it a non-starter, then the E28, just as a vacuum, could be a solid alternative that’s shaped more like a regular robot vacuum and can, therefore, go more places.

The Omni E28’s gimmick is that most of its base—the clean and dirty water tanks, suction motor, and a hose attachment hidden under a cowl—is also a modular, manual wet vac that you can tote around to deal with liquid spills on rugs and furniture upholstery. And pleasantly, this actually works pretty well, but for some caveats I’ll get into later in this review.

For now, is the Omni E28 worth its street price of $1,400? No, and for me, its flaws mean it’s not even worth the $700 the company has it priced at as of this writing if you clip a coupon on its website.

Frustration-free operation (mostly)

I’ve always loved robot vacuums as the science fiction gadgets they still are to me, whether they work particularly well or not. But it feels like they’ve recently crossed some vague threshold of set-it-and-forget-it-ness that makes them finally feel practical. That’s not true of all of them—see my review of the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller—but the Omni E28 seems to tick most of the boxes.

Box number one? It can vacuum, and quickly. The Omni E28 generally handled the roughly 300-square-feet area I gave it to clean—which includes my living room, dining room, and kitchen—in around 30 minutes, leaving very little behind in the process. Eufy says it can run for up to 216 minutes in vacuuming-only mode, which should mean it runs long enough to cover most homes in one go. As for vacuum performance, in direct, head-to-head testing, it collected fewer rice grains and less sugar than the Matic, but not by a lot. And it was good at avoiding household objects (another box I like to see ticked) hewing close to the edges of clothes, books, and other large objects without driving over them and jamming up its dust roller. It would still gobble up small objects like pencil-top erasers and paperclips, but so has every other robot vacuum I’ve tested. The Omni E28 wasn’t so noisy that I couldn’t comfortably talk over it—something else that I consider a requirement.

All of that means I was able to let the robot go on its own at night without it being bothersome, at least if I set it not to automatically empty its bin into its extremely noisy dock. (More on that later.) The Omni E28 almost always ended up back in its dock the next morning, only once getting stuck overnight when it tried to ingest one of my kid’s sweaters. Unlike my Roomba J7, that sort of thing doesn’t seem to make it run out of battery—it still had an over 70% charge, letting me send it on its way again after freeing it.

The Omni E28 wasn’t a great mopping robot out of the box. Eufy didn’t include any of its bespoke cleaning solution and doesn’t recommend using just any old floor cleaner, so I stuck with water during testing. Even so, it ought to be able to clean up some of the salty crud my family brings into our entryway after heavy snows like those we had while I was testing Eufy’s robot, but it didn’t seem to make a dent in it. And when I sent it to deal with ketchup I’d squirted on the ground, it got most of it, but left some smears—and tracked some onto the rug in front of its base. The wet vac module was helpful there, but it highlighted why it’s just not that great an idea to trust robot vacuums with such messes.

I’m also not especially impressed with how the Omni E28 seems to handle change. In my entryway are three small rugs that we leave our boots and shoes on when we come in from outside. I moved them, hoping the robot would mop where they were, but it didn’t seem to register the difference, still avoiding the space where they were. Nice to know it wouldn’t have mopped the rugs, but in the ever-morphing environment of a human household, I want my robot vacuums to be more adaptable.

Dock of all trades, master of some

I liked how quiet the Omni E28 was while it toodled around my house, sucking up dirt and debris. But holy hell, it sounds like the end of days when the dock clears the robot’s dustbin. Not only that, but the dock always engages its vacuum motor twice in a row, and the second time it’s somehow even louder. It even does it once during the mop-cleaning cycle, and each time the dock turns on its vacuum motor, it fills the air with this unpleasantly musty, chemical odor. The smell got less intense after a few cycles, so hopefully it goes away in time.

On the plus side, Eufy’s cleaning base seems to be quick to clean its mop roll, and it doesn’t take forever to prepare the roll before a mopping job, unlike the Aqua10 Ultra Roller. That’s good, unless it means the roller isn’t getting as clean and would need replacing sooner. According to Eufy’s site, the mop roll should last about two months, give or take depending on usage, before it needs replacing.

Besides that, the dock uses 3-liter vacuum bags that Eufy says can last around 75 days before you have to swap them out. Also, the base mixes water and cleaning solution for you, so if you decide to buy Eufy’s solution, all you have to do is fill a small container on the base and you’re done there. And the generous 2.5-liter water tank meant that I didn’t have to refill it across several spot cleans with the deep cleaner and multiple mopping runs of the roughly 100 to 200-square-feet of exposed hard flooring I have in my home.

The wet vac is the star of the dock’s show, though. It’s a lot like the ones I used to see on infomercials as a kid that spray water into a rug or carpet and feature a transparent cleaning head you can watch it suck dirty water back up through. That’s attached to a flexible hose that sticks out of the side of the module, sending water into the Omni E28’s 1.8-liter dirty water tank. Happily, this thing works—remember that ketchup I mentioned earlier? There’s no sign of it in my rug. Same goes for some spilled milk I cleaned up during the testing process (after crying over it, of course). It’s all deeply satisfying, and a nice bonus, especially if this isn’t the sort of thing you already have in your house as a standalone device.

How long the wet vac will be useful and not a nuisance is another question. The hose seems to trap water easily, meaning you have to be careful when wrapping it back up at the end or you’ll end up with dirty puddles on the floor next to the base afterward. But also, trapped water means mold and the bad smells that come with it—so I’d expect to disassemble and clean it regularly. Maintenance is a regular part of life if you own a robot vacuum, but there’s a line for everyone, and this one crosses it for me. I also found the wet vac noisy (it’s the same motor that empties the robot vacuum’s dustbin, after all), and I don’t like that it shares its power cable with the dock overall, meaning I had to reach behind a piece of furniture to unplug it every time I wanted to use it. Lastly, I have a bit of a semantic gripe—Eufy calls this a deep cleaner, which to me implies that it can do more than just suck up liquids; in practice, it clogged easily when I used it on any serious amount of debris.

Eufy gets better at app interface design

Eufy does a better job than usual with the Omni E28’s user interface (accessible via the Eufy Clean app). Its map is presented in 3D by default, although you can use the old 2D presentation found on other, older Eufy robot vacuums like the Robovac L35 if you prefer, and the company has done a mostly good job making sure it’s an accurate representation of your home, insofar as a bunch of colorful rectangles can do that. It doesn’t quite place all the rugs in my house properly on its own, though, so I had to do that manually, or face the possibility of having the robot try to mop them.

The home screen for the vacuum consists of the interactive map, tabs for choosing where you want the robot to clean—”Common,” or preset areas you can configure; “Home,” or the whole region it has mapped; “Room,” or cleaning by rooms in the order you choose; and “Zone,” which you’ll use to send the robot to do spot cleaning by drawing a rectangle on the map.

Once you’ve picked where you want it to go to work, you’ll choose the specific tasks the robot will carry out. At the top of the screen there’s an “AI Automation” toggle that preselects options for you, but if you prefer to be in control, you can pick whether you want it to vacuum, vacuum and mop, and clean quickly or deeply. You can also choose how much suction it uses, via labels “Quiet,” “Turbo,” and “Max,” as well as whether you want it to do one or two cleaning passes.

A settings icon at the top of the home screen gets you to cleaning history, scheduling, general preferences, and even a set of experimental “Eufy Lab” features. One of those was “Smart Track Cleaning,” a mode where the robot follows you, cleaning as it goes. I love the idea, even if this beta implementation wasn’t very good; it got stuck on corners and lost track of me if I walked out of sight or got tricked by a pair of nearby shoes. It didn’t even have to be shoes; it once mistook the pedal on my trashcan for my foot—see the picture above—and stopped there, waiting for the can to start walking. (It did not.)

With another of the experimental features, “Dirt Inspection,” turned on, the Omni E28 will go back after cleaning and inspect each room to see if it missed anything. In testing, it did do that, and it did pick up some dead plant leaves I dropped in one of the rooms it had cleaned, but it also seemed to just be going back and doing another quick pass regardless. It was hard to tell if this feature did anything beyond that. But hey, another quick pass is nice?

One non-experimental software feature I was pleased to see was support for the universal smart home standard Matter. That means the robot works with Apple Home, and that I could talk to my HomePods to get it to clean everywhere, only specific rooms, or to end the job early and go to its dock. All of that worked pretty well in my testing. It’s not as extensive as using the app itself, but that’s not unusual for more complex smart home products like this.

A mixed bag

The Eufy Robot Vacuum Omni E28 has some high highs—it’s very good at both vacuuming and object avoidance, two key things that make it a great candidate for the kind of set-it-and-forget-it scheduling that I prefer in a robot vacuum. Unfortunately, its mopping performance is too low a low for me to want to deal with the headache and upkeep of its water tanks, both internal to the robot and in the dock itself; I’d rather save money on a vacuum-only robot, and mop the old fashioned way. I also wish its dock wasn’t so startlingly loud.

The “deep clean” module, misnamed or not, is the next best thing this robot has going for it. It’s fun and effective, but that comes at the cost of lots of maintenance and maybe a few puddles on your floor when it leaks. Ultimately, if the Eufy Omni E28 hits enough of the right notes that if Eufy sold it for $400 without the self-empty base, I’d consider it. But subpar mopping and a noisy base just don’t justify its $1,400—or even $700 discounted—price.