We’ve recommended the Tapo RV30 Max Plus for a while now as the best budget robot vacuum you can buy. Don’t take “budget” to mean “cheap,” though. During our latest round of testing, I was impressed with how easy the vacuum was to set up and use and (most importantly) how clean it left my floors, whether hardwood, carpet, or tile. It’s an exceptional, affordable robot vacuum that also mops.

Sure, there are some compromises. I wasn’t completely happy with the obstacle avoidance and had to rescue the RV30 a couple of times (more on that below). But for the price you pay and how little attention the vacuum needs from you, it’s more than worth it.

This is the first robot vacuum I’ve tested, but the setup process for the dock and vacuum itself wasn’t intimidating. Tapo’s user manual is easy to follow, and there’s even a quick-start guide on one of the inner lids of the box. Once I had the dock in an ideal location and plugged in, I removed some of the packaging bits from the vacuum, placed it on the floor, and hit the home button to send it to the dock to get an initial charge in.

Getting the software up and running was more complicated. I downloaded the Tapo app and told it to “find nearby devices.” A few feet away wasn’t “nearby” enough apparently, because the app couldn’t find the RV30.

It was a minor setback though. I clicked through the various menus to select the RV30 manually, turned the Bluetooth and location on my phone on, and the app synced to the vacuum that way. Not to worry if keeping Bluetooth and location activated all the time isn’t your thing. During the next step, I connected the RV30 to my home’s WiFi, and I can now activate it from anywhere—even at my office in the next town over as I write this.

Though the automatic pairing failed, the RV30 is simple enough to pair with the app manually, as you can see in this screen recording of my phone. It took about a minute.

The RV30’s mapping run of the first floor of my house took about five minutes. It’s not a big space, about 500 square feet divided into a living room, kitchen, pantry, bathroom, and laundry room. But there are a lot of obstacles, like a Pack n’ Play, kitchen table and chairs, the drying rack in the laundry room, and the minefield that is my son’s toy car collection, among other hurdles.

I expected the vacuum to get tripped up by all that, but it didn’t. The RV30 did a decent job winding around the furniture and identifying areas even if it couldn’t reach them to clean. But there are some blank spots on the map, like in corners of the bathroom next to the sink.

From there I was able to fine-tune the map in the app. The main screen is the layout of the house the RV30 took during its mapping run. I labeled and named the rooms and placed objects such as the kitchen table, chairs, litter box, and pet bowls on the map.

Just know that the first version of the map from the RV30 is somewhat rough, and you might have to get your hands dirty beyond that. I needed to manually draw a border between the living room and the kitchen; the doorway between them is wide, and the RV30 initially clocked them as one room. Some of the other robot vacuums we’ve tried, like the Roborock Qrevo QV 35A, are able to automatically identify the floor types that separate rooms and block off obstacles on the map, making for a more hands-off process.

Adjusting the vacuum power and number of passes the vacuum makes is easy to manage via a little bottom drawer in the app. This is also where you create custom jobs, and this feature allowed me to tell the RV30 to clean just the pantry/laundry room where the litter box is. That space needs it more often than relatively crumb-free areas like the living room.

Though the first floor of my house is small, it has a variety of surfaces: wood, area rugs, and tile. And the RV30 has done a good job vacuuming all of them, picking up crumbs, pet hair, and litter. After the test runs I supervised, I scheduled the RV30 to do a full sweep of the first floor while I was at work. Everything looked so clean when I came home that I wondered if my wife had swept or mopped, not knowing I’d run the RV30. She hadn’t.

The laundry room and pantry have light beige tiles, so crud stands out more clearly. But the RV30 picked up most crumbs that a vacuum could expect to get. Its little spinning brush arms did a nice job reaching into corners and along baseboards to funnel dirt toward the brush roll.

A small lip separates the pantry’s tile from the kitchen’s hardwood, and the vacuum stalled only once trying to get over it. But it backed up, came at it from a different angle, and made it. It hasn’t had an issue since. Nor has it gotten hung up on any of the curled corners of the area rugs. And even when I change the room layout on it, like by moving the dog bed, the RV30 adapted and vacuumed as close around it as it could.

When it comes to mopping, the RV30 is solid, but not spectacular. I had it mop the pantry and laundry room, and it did a fine job. The coverage was streaky at first until the mopping pad fully saturated. But once it did, the vacuum mopped 95 percent of the floor. There were some caked-on bits it left behind. Tapo says to not fill the onboard water tank with “cleaning agent,” which limits the RV30’s mopping power.

And as a heads-up, the water tank was half empty when the RV30 was done. This is the smallest room it has to mop, so I’m not confident it would be able to cover all the hardwood and tile in my house in one go without needing a top-off. So you might have to be deliberate with what you tell the RV30 to mop if you want it to finish a job while you’re out at work or asleep.

While the RV30 did an impressive job navigating under the kitchen table and between all the chair legs, it got tangled up in the power cord for our hand vac charger and I had to manually extricate it—twice. I wasn’t thrilled, but I went back and set off this area as an exclusion zone in the app, and it has stayed away. I was nervous about this during that first cleaning run while I was away from home, but the app sent me a notification letting me know the job was done successfully and the RV30 was safely back at its dock.

Tapo advertises the RV30 as quiet, since it makes 50-ish decibels worth of noise. But that’s a stretch. If you’re anywhere remotely within earshot, you’ll never wonder if the vacuum is out and about.

Other than helping the RV30 free of the power cord it kept running over, it hasn’t needed much else from me. There are some smaller hairs tangled in the brush roll, but none of the parts are wearing out yet from what I can see.

The battery life is solid for a small space. The RV30 takes about 45 minutes to make two passes across the roughly 400 square feet of the first floor it can access, and it hasn’t had to return to the dock to charge or empty its onboard dustbin mid-job. I haven’t had an instance yet where I’ve run the battery all the way down, but Tapo says on its site that the vacuum will take four hours to fully charge, which will add significant time to any cleaning job.

When it’s done, the RV30 has no problem returning to and emptying its onboard dustbin into the dock. Emptying is loud, though Tapo gives you a pop-up notification in the app warning you of this. And after my latest test run, I noticed that there were crumbs and tufts of dust that didn’t empty from the vacuum’s dustbin. So you might want to have the RV30 manually empty into the dock a couple of times to fully clear out.

Overall, the Tapo RV30 is a good value at $230. That’s among the lowest prices of the robot vacuums we recommend, and a solid deal for a vacuum-mop combo. We do a deep clean of the house once a month, and the RV30 won’t replace that. But if, like me, you have a small space that you want to keep from getting too messy without spending more than a few hundred dollars, you can’t go wrong with this model.

Buy the Tapo RV30 Max Plus Robot Vacuum