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iRobot Roomba 890 vs iRobot Roomba 980

Product Comparison: iRobot Roomba 890 vs iRobot Roomba 980

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iRobot Roomba 890 Robot Vacuum Cleaner with Wi-Fi Connectivity

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iRobot Roomba 980 Navigation with Visual Localization

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General Specifications

Brand

iRobot

Model

Roomba 890

Roomba 980

Origin

China

About the Product

Connect to CLEAN from anywhere with the advanced cleaning performance of the Roomba® 890 Wi-Fi Connected Vacuuming Robot. An advanced Triple-Stage Cleaning System with Edge-Sweeping brush loosens, lifts, and suctions dirt, debris and hair with 5x more power for increased cleaning performance.

The Roomba® 980 robot vacuum gives you cleaner floors, throughout your entire home, all at the push of a button. Roomba 980 seamlessly navigates an entire level of your home, keeping track of its location and recharging as needed until the job is done. The AeroForce® Cleaning System with Power Boost automatically increases power on carpets where it's needed most. And with the iRobot HOME App, you can clean and schedule on the go.

Key Specs

Cleaning Path Width

7 in.

Cleaning Area Per Charge

860 sq.ft

2000 sq.ft

Run Time

120 min.

Multi Surface

Yes

Filters

HEPA

What customers say about "Key Specs"

iRobot Roomba 890 Robot Vacuum Cleaner with Wi-Fi Connectivity

Does a great job cleaning both carpet and hard surfaces and is a big time saver.
Easy to set up, app works perfectly, cleans well. Battery last a long time
So far it has done a great job picking up the smallest particles. Not to noisey. I can turn the TV up a little but run it at the same time.
Very good on wood, tile, and carpeted floors. Very effective on pet hair. Debris capture capacity could be greater. Charge duration is reasonable, cleans 800 sqft on hardwoods per charge.
I bought this because we have a dog and was hoping it would help to reduce the fur balls. This has exceeded my expectations. It keeps both our hard surface and carpet floors very clean.
Only balled up Border Collie pet hair and did not suck it up. Did not deep clean, only surface cleaned.

iRobot Roomba 980 Navigation with Visual Localization

Surprisingly good run time for both battery and dust bin.
Does a pretty good job on carpet. Running twice a week keeps the carpet clean. I'd suspect it wouldn't be as clean considering our pets if we ran it less often. Running a regular vacuum on the carpet doesn't pick up much after the bot runs.
It did go back to the base when battery went low in a middle of a second test run (it didn't get much charging time after I got it out of the box).
Overall decent navigation that never once got stuck and always made it back to the charging base.
Pretty good suction power. Good run times of around an hour and half with carpet boost on auto.
Only runs about 90min for us (with ½ high, thick carpet and ½ tile flooring).
Need to pick up chairs if the spacing between legs is too narrow to let the robot squeeze in.
No option to change the speed of the vacuum. How hard could it be to add 3 speed options? Slow, medium, fast.

Size & Weight

Material

Plastic

Color

Black

Height

3.6 in.

Width

13.9 in.

13.8 in.

Depth

13.9 in.

13.8 in.

Weight

8.4 lbs.

8.7 lbs.

Controls

Connectivity Technology

Wi-Fi 2.4GHz

Remote Control

Voice Assistant Built-in

Yes

App-Controlled

Yes

Room-By-Room Navigation

Yes

Auto Docking And Recharging

Yes

What customers say about "Controls"

iRobot Roomba 890 Robot Vacuum Cleaner with Wi-Fi Connectivity

Works as advertised. The smartphone app lets you set an automatic schedule for it to work. It also works fine with Alexa.
Quite liberating, my wife simply set the automatic timer, the main floor of our house gets cleaned everyday same time - haven't needed to manually vacuum since (just need to keep an eye on the collection trap)
Great vacuum, can control via wfi or via Google home, never have to vacuum first floor again
Perfect gift for my wife. She uses almost every day, can control from phone and do whatever we need to do while floors get swept!
Love being able to vacuum while I’m doing so many other things. I also like being able to control it with a app on my phone

iRobot Roomba 980 Navigation with Visual Localization

The mobile app works very well and provides messages when needed on progress of cleaning and trouble alerts.
A virtual map is provided in the mobile app showing the floor space cleaned, which is kind of cool and helps to see where it is cleaning or having difficulty getting around.
Intuitive and useful app with quite a few useful features.
Having the roomba be controlled by the app and Alexa is amazing. This model is incredibly smart and it does an amazing job compared to the Dyson we have. I
The app was the most annoying part of setting Roomba up; it did not like my Wi-Fi at first. You can use the robot without it, but I do not see a way of manually program the robot.

Features

Automatic Cleaning Patterns

Circular pattern, Edge pattern, Z-shape pattern

Circular pattern, Straight line

Adjustable Suction Power

Programming Clean-Ups

Clean and shedule from anything

Cliff Sensor

Yes

Dust Bin Capacity

18.6 oz.

20 oz.

Full Bin Indicator

Yes

Mop

Wet And Dry Usage

Protective Bumpers

Yes

Extras

5x the air power, 3-Stage Cleaning System, Dual Mode Virtual Wall Barrier, Cleans all floor types, Advanced Dirt Detect Technology, iRobot HOME App, Compatible on devices with Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant

iRobot HOME App lets you clean and schedule conveniently, The robot automatically returns to the Home Base, 3-stage cleaning system with Carpet Boost, Tangle-free brushes, Voice control capability

Dust Bin Capacity
Full Bin Indicator

What customers say about "Features"

iRobot Roomba 890 Robot Vacuum Cleaner with Wi-Fi Connectivity

I have owned several of these and would definitely recommend. Vacuum can get under bed, which I love the most. Device automatically docks itself when done cleaning.
I used the virtual wall tower to have it just vacuum one of my rooms. Surprisingly this Roomba really picks up well.
The 890 is packed with an extra filter for future use and also a virtual wall device which I set up next to the cat's food area to avoid water or food bowl spillage.
To clean the dust bin is very simple. Also, this unit comes with an extra filter, and a virtual wall barrier, which it is useful if you want to prevent the unit to get into a specific area.
Every time the bin gets full it gives a "bin is full" alert on the app and completely cancels the job, meaning you will have to restart the job multiple times in its entirety to finish it.
For starters, in any given room, the vacuum will room around bumping into walls and furniture, roll back and forth across the same area a few times, and leave huge portions of the room uncleaned.

iRobot Roomba 980 Navigation with Visual Localization

Very verbose error reporting if it's stuck, has a full dust bin, but you have to open the app or be in the same room as the bot to know this.
Does a very good job on the hardware and with the corning cleaning turned on, does a pretty decent job along the edges of walls.
Cleans in spots you don't normally get to, such as under the bed and in the wee spots of closets.
Love the scheduling feature and how easy it is to change from week to week depending on our always shifting schedules.
It performs a logical cleaning pattern (not random) that covers all of the floor, cleaning sections of each room and then moving on to the next section. It acts quite "intelligent," sometimes stopping to look around and "think" before proceeding.
It looks like all carpet with dark colors trick it into thinking it's jumping off a cliff. We ended up replacing some rugs to get around this.One of our rugs had a thick black line in the trim and roomba wouldn't cross it for anything.
No brush option that actually picks up dog hair from carpets.

Power

Voltage

14.4 V

Wattage

26 watts

48 watts

Battery Capacity

1800 mAh

3300 mAh

Battery Charge Time

180 min.