We’re continuously testing the best vacuum cleaners across various types, sizes, and price ranges — all in the quest to help you find the top vacuum for your cleaning needs. Our cleaning experts have come to identify a great vacuum equipped to last from an OK one that inevitably lands up in the dreaded vacuum graveyard. In selecting the bet vacuum, we look for features like powerful suction, brushrolls that don’t tangle with hair, advanced filtration, and headlights to help rid floors of dust and debris.
From cordless stick vacuums that rival the power and cleaning performance of their upright counterparts to lightweight handhelds for targeting small messes, the best vacuum type depends on where and on what surfaces you’ll use it most, plus the weight and maneuverability of the vacuum itself.
The products in this guide represent the best of the best vacuum cleaners in their respective categories, including budget options and models optimized for tackling pet hair. We think the best cordless vacuum is the Shark Stratos Cordless Vacuum. In our tests, we were impressed by its smooth operation on hard floors, the automated suction that maximized battery life, and an LED headlight that showed particles we otherwise would have missed. If you’re a traditionalist who prefers the stability of an upright and never worrying about recharging, the Shark Stratos Upright Vacuum is reliable and a strong performer on carpets and hard floors.
Best cordless
Shark Stratos Cordless Vacuum
The Shark Stratos Cordless Vacuum gets the cleaning job done with strong, automatically adjusting suction and easy maneuverability. This is a great vacuum for households with everyday vacuuming needs.
This Shark Stratos cordless is one of the best cordless vacuums for most people, easily picking up kibble, ground coffee, lentils, and dog hair from our standardized tests on hardwood and carpet, as well as everyday household dirt. It’s equipped with powerful suction and a dual brushroll design: a soft front brushroll captures fine particles and stops larger debris from spitting out and a back brushroll with rigid bristles gets deep into carpeting and pulls up dirt. Perhaps the most convenient feature is how strands of hair do not wrap around the brushroll, making it an ideal pick for households with pets or even long human hair.
The Shark Stratos has three cleaning modes, including Shark’s CleanSense IQ, which uses an infrared sensor to automatically increase or decrease power depending on the amount of debris it’s picking up. It also helps maximize battery life. It did struggle with very fine particles like flour and required a few passes to suction it all up, but overall, the Stratos has impressive cleaning abilities.
The Shark Stratos easily slides underneath low spots like a bed or sofa thanks to its bendable stick and swivel head design, which is very simple to maneuver. When it’s time to put it away, the wand folds over for easy storage.
The battery life lasts up to 60 minutes, but that number varies depending on whether you’re cleaning carpets or hard floors. The LED display screen indicates how much battery you have left.
The Stratos incorporates Shark’s odor-neutralizing technology, which adds a scent to mask odors and leave floors smelling fresher. Two testers of Shark products with the feature did not particularly love this extra or expressed a plan to purchase the replacement filters once the filter lost its scent. However, this feature does not affect cleaning performance.
Read our Shark Stratos Cordless Vacuum review for more details and our full guide to the best cordless vacuums for more recommendations.
Best budget
Bissell Cleanview Swivel Vacuum
The Bissell Cleanview Swivel Vacuum is a bit large but powerful and operates smoothly. It comes with attachments to pick up pet hair and clean hard-to-reach spots.
Bissell’s Cleanview Swivel Pet Vacuum is your classic corded upright vacuum. As restrictive as the cords can be, Bissell builds in many thoughtful design features to compensate for the inconvenience.
The large, square cleaner head has a brush roll that effectively lifts and removes small and large debris, passing all of our cleaning tests with flying colors. From whole Cheerios to fine flour, the vacuum cleaned up the particles quickly and worked well with pet hair.
It has five settings for different floor types, which you must bend down and adjust at the top of the cleaner head. But turning on the vacuum is as easy as pressing a lever at the base with your foot. There’s also a separate foot pedal to tilt the vacuum and allow it to swivel in different directions.
The generously sized dust bin is easy to remove, and the contents empty out at the bottom, so you’ll have minimal or no direct contact with all the contents. The bin has a handle on top so you can easily lift and carry your vacuum.
With its consistent, powerful suction and maneuverability, the vacuum is already a great deal. Even better, it comes with a few attachments stored directly on the vacuum, which you can attach to the 6-foot-long hose to clean upholstery or get into crevices.
Best splurge
Dyson V15 Detect Cordless Vacuum
The Dyson V15 Detect will change the way you clean your floors, with its groundbreaking laser technology that reveals the dust your eyes or even LED lights can’t see. Excellent suction power, performance, and battery life make this one of Dyson’s top offerings.
I’ve tested my fair share of premium vacuums, but the one that I continue to reach for is the Dyson V15 Detect. Among the best Dyson vacuums, it’s loaded with features like automatic adjusting suction, long battery life, and powerful cleaning performance, but its innovative laser technology is where the vacuum really shines. Dyson incorporated a green diode laser to reveal the dirt and dust the eye can’t see in the Fluffy Optic Cleaner Head, a soft roller for cleaning hard floors. While LED lights are useful for lighting the path in front of you, the laser is more beneficial at showing every dirt speck and dust bunny, and extremely satisfying.
For cleaning rugs and carpets, I switch to the Digital Motorbar Cleaner Head, Dyson’s default cleaner head design on the rest of its product lineup. It’s effective on both carpets and hard flooring and is excellent at resisting hair wrap from pets or human hair.
I trialed both floor heads through our pick-up tests, and both floor heads suctioned up the particles with ease. On hard floors, the Fluffy Optic head was marginally better at picking up fine flour and crunched through Cheerios with little effort. With the Digital Motorbar Cleaner Head, I noticed flour deposited in the crevices of the floorhead, and I needed to adjust suction height settings to pick up Cheerios on hard floors. That said, it maneuvered with finesse on the carpet, which was my preferred surface to use this cleaner head with.
The Dyson V15 Detect is lightweight and easy to use. The battery lasts up to an hour, the longest on hard floors and the shortest on the carpet. A piezo sensor counts dust particles to provide scientific evidence of how much debris was suctioned up, but it primarily functions to control the amount of suction and maximize battery life when in Auto mode. The 0.2-gallon dust bin employs Dyson’s signature hygienic bin system, where the collected dirt ejects directly into the trash with a lever. If you overflow the bin past the Max fill line, you may find yourself needing to reach in to clean out anything that gets stuck, which is typical of most bagless vacuums
Best for pet hair
Dyson Outsize Cordless Vacuum
The powerful Dyson Outsize Cordless Vacuum excels at picking up pet hair, has up to 60 minutes of run time, and features a large dustbin for longer, uninterrupted cleans.
While the above picks are also great choices for households with pets (the cordless Shark Stratos also tops our guide to the best vacuum for pet hair), the Dyson Outsize has an especially large 0.5-gallon dust bin capacity that makes it ideal for households with pets that shed a lot or large homes, meaning you won’t have to pause cleaning to empty the dust bin as often. The Outsize also has an 11.5-inch-wide cleaner head designed for cleaning more in each pass, of which debris was effortlessly picked up on a single pass.
The Outsize vacuum stood out in our tests because it can remove pet hair on all surfaces without the cleaner head getting tangled. It excelled in cleaning up all debris on carpeting and hardwood floors, except for a trace of coffee grounds on carpets and nominal amounts of flour on both surfaces. In handheld mode, the Outsize performed well on furniture, leaving only about 5% of flour and cat litter behind.
A spherical wheel on the cleaner head makes maneuvering the Outsize a breeze. I moved it from side to side with a gentle wrist rotation. At nearly 8 pounds, the handheld mode can be heavy. Also, the trigger power button design requires you to keep your finger on the power button to keep it running, limiting how you can hold the vacuum.
The trapdoor mechanism on the Dyson vacuum’s dust bin releases debris, so you don’t come in contact with it. Yet, attachments must be removed before you can empty the dust bin, and you might miss your trash can if you don’t position the dust bin just right.
Stock on the Dyson Outsize can be pretty volatile, but I continue to recommend it to pet owners and those with large homes who want a cordless vacuum because there’s really nothing comparable in capacity from competitors who want to clean for long periods of time without pausing to empty the bin. Alternatively, there is the Dyson Gen5Outsize, which shares the half-gallon dustbin and features Dyson’s most advanced cleaning technologies, but it is nearly double the price.
Best lightweight
Levoit LVAC-200 Cordless Stick Vacuum
Levoit’s cordless stick vacuum offers great performance for the price. It can clean for up to 50 minutes, has two power settings, and has a special ability to store upright.
A lightweight vacuum is great for carrying between floors, above-floor cleaning, and everyday use. For reference, most stick vacuums weigh between four and seven pounds, and upright models start at about 13 pounds. The Levoit LVAC-200 Cordless Stick Vacuum bucks convention weighs under three and a half pounds.
It is easy to maneuver and offers a comfortable grip that never causes arm strain. It’s also remarkably budget-friendly, with a price tag of under $200. Oh, and it can stand upright.
The Levoit LVAC-200 Cordless Stick Vacuum is lightweight in nature but powerful in performance. It has three cleaning modes: eco, mid, and turbo. Its battery life is up to 50 minutes, but it varies drastically based on the setting. It handled small debris, like rice, sugar, and flour, well on carpets and hard floors, though larger debris like cereal took a few extra passes. Pet hair also didn’t wrap around the brush roll.
Despite being compact, the dust bin was sizeable enough that we didn’t have to stop to empty it every five minutes, and the noise level was unobtrusive. Our reviewer wished the LED headlights cast light further, and sometimes had to reach her hand into the dust cup to pull out stuck pieces of debris. The vacuum is also not HEPA-rated, though it does have a five-stage filtration system that Levoit says captures 99.9% of 0.3-micron particles.
Best handheld
Black+Decker Dustbuster Cordless Handheld Vacuum (model HHVI315JO42)
The Black+Decker Dustbuster Cordless Handheld Vacuum (model HHVI315JO42) is the most affordable and best handheld vacuum we tested. It performs well on carpet, hardwood, and in the car.
The Dustbuster was the original handheld vacuum developed for NASA over 40 years ago. So it’s no surprise that one of these vacs, the Black+Decker Dustbuster Cordless Handheld Vacuum (model HHVI315JO42), performed the best in our tests.
The Dustbuster HHVI315JO42 was one of the best vacuums that we tested for car cleaning and was among the best on hardwood and carpeting. While other models struggled with flour and Cheerios, the Dustbuster was the best at picking up these substances on hardwood floors.
This well-balanced handheld vacuum weighs slightly over 2 pounds, making it comfortable for longer cleaning jobs. However, the run time was among the shortest of the models we tested (12 minutes), and you can’t tell when the battery is low since there’s no charge indicator light.
It has a simple on/off button and a button to release the dust bin (remove the mesh filter and then empty it). You can wash the filter with water and let it air dry before reinserting. The dustbin was twice as large as the competition.
The Dustbuster was among the quietest handhelds we tested, but it was still as loud as a noisy restaurant.
Best wet-dry
Tineco Floor One S7 Pro
The Tineco Floor One S7 Pro reigns supreme with its excellent performance, auto dirt detection system, high-tech LCD screen with an assistant, and brushroll drying capabilities.
Wet-dry vacuums have gained popularity for their ability to vacuum and mop simultaneously. While we don’t think they’ll fully replace your favorite upright or cordless stick vacuum — especially if you have carpets or rely on attachments like crevice tools and dusting brush — they are a time-saving and thorough machine for giving a deeper clean to your hard floors.
Tineco leads the way with its collection of cordless wet-dry vacuums. Rated our best wet-dry vacuum overall, the Tineco Floor One S7 Pro is packed with features like iLoop Smart Sensor that detects dirt and stains on the floor, adjusts suction accordingly, and signals to you when your floor is clean; a self-cleaning system that also dries the brush roll; better-edge cleaning; self-propelling; a cleaning assistant with LCD graphics and more. It also has a long 40-minute runtime and a clean water tank large enough to last through cleaning sessions.
The Tineco Floor One S7 Pro offers four modes: auto, max, ultra, and suction. Max and ultra provide more water for tough stains, and the suction mode sucks up liquid spills. It generally took only one or two passes of the Tineco Floor One S7 Pro to clean up any kind of debris, liquid, or stain.
Wet-dry vacuums need to be cleaned immediately following use to prevent mold and bacteria build-up, and Tineco’s maintenance is one of the least involved, though pouring out the accumulated dirty water tank is both gross and satisfying. The Tineco Floor One S7 Pro has two self-cleaning modes: a quick one that takes two minutes and a super self-cleaning mode that takes six minutes and also dries the brush roll.
The biggest drawback of the Tineco is its price. For a less expensive option, its predecessor, the Tineco Floor One S5, offers great cleaning performance, too but does not have a suction mode to suck up wet messes and a slightly shorter runtime.
What to look for in a vacuum cleaner
When choosing from the best vacuums, your primary considerations are the vacuum type (see FAQ), reliable suction and cleaning performance, mess-free debris disposal, a strong warranty, a long battery life (if cordless), a well-designed brush head, and ease of use.
Here are some other important features:
Cleanerhead and attachments
Your vacuum needs a well-designed cleanerhead (brushroll) to collect the dust and dirt on your floors. These can vary in material from soft roller to silicone or hard plastic with strategically placed bristles and should have some sort of hair-resistance feature. In addition to a durable brush head, you’ll also want to look for vacuums with the following attachments:
- Crevice tool: A long, flat attachment with an angled tip. It’s good for getting into tight corners, including baseboards, stairs, and between couch cushions.
- Upholstery tool: A wide, flat attachment that allows for strong suction. It’s good for furniture with fabric upholstery, like mattresses, chairs, and couches.
- Dusting Brush: These attachments have bristles ideal for clearing dust from baseboards, molding, blinds, and more without scratching surfaces.
- Wand: Often featured on upright vacuums, wands detach from the main body to allow you to reach spots the head can’t go. They’re useful for cleaning stairs, corners, and upholstery.
Weight
When cleaning your whole house, you want a machine that is light enough to carry from room to room and up and down stairs, and not too difficult to push. Cordless stick vacuums should weigh under 10 pounds, while uprights can hover in the 15-20 pound range. For smaller jobs and above-floor cleaning, a handheld vacuum or a cordless that converts into a handheld, you’ll want something under 5 pounds to reduce strain on your arms, though lighter is even more ideal.
Dust bin
Most of the vacuums we recommend are bagless. They are designed to allow clean air to pass through the motor without impeding suction or clogging. Instead of collecting in a bag, the debris collects in a reusable dust bin that can be easily emptied after each use.
Traditional vacuum bags have tiny holes that act as filters, trapping dust and dirt while allowing air to pass through. However, they’re harder to empty and clean. Some vacuums use disposable bags, but this is an added cost you have to factor into the lifetime value of your vacuum. Bagged vacuums are a good option for people with severe allergies and sensitivities to dust.
Also, consider dust bin size. If it’s too small, you’ll find yourself constantly stopping to visit the trash. Those with carpets and pets that shed will want to want to consider higher-volume bins. We like bins that can handle at least 0.2 gallons, though the Shark Stratos falls just below that at 0.18 gallons.
Filter
We recommend looking for vacuums with a HEPA filter, particularly if anyone in your home is prone to allergies. To meet HEPA standards, a high-efficiency particulate or HEPA filter must filter 99.97% of airborne particles. Most high-quality vacuum cleaners contain HEPA filters. Many are washable and reusable and should be cleaned regularly.
Warranty
If problems arise, you want your vacuum’s warranty to cover them. Most vacuum warranties range from one to five years. Look for a solid money-back guarantee to ensure you can return your vac if you’re unhappy with its performance.
How we test the best vacuum cleaners
Vacuuming ability: We tested the vacuums on carpeting, hardwood, and tile, picking up flour, ground coffee, cat litter, Cheerios, and fur. We assessed how well each vacuum picked up the materials and weighed the dust bins to evaluate how much was picked up. If a vacuum came with attachments, we tested them on the appropriate surfaces, like baseboards and furniture. We also tested the obstacle avoidance and corner cleaning capabilities of robot vacuums.
Battery runtime: We timed how long cordless vacuums ran until their batteries died and how long it took to recharge them.
Ease of use and comfort: We assessed the experience of powering the vacuum, maneuverability, and how tiring it is to hold, and even noise emitted. We noted if it could fit under low-profile furniture and if it had additional features that improved functionality, such as a headlight.
Debris disposal: After cleaning sessions, we evaluated how easy and clean emptying the dust bin was. The vacuum lost points if we came in contact with the debris when disposing of it or if it was otherwise messy.
Storage: We looked at how easy it was to store the vacuum, including if it broke down into a smaller footprint or if it came with a docking station or wall mount.
