The eufy Omni C28 Robot Vacuum Almost Replaced My Mops Entirely

With its self-cleaning dock, rotating mop and LiDAR navigation, the eufy Omni C28 robot vacuum has the hardware to compete with vacuums, mops and hybrids that can cost considerably more. And in everyday use it largely holds its own.

For combined cleaning it performs well on hard floors and with pet hair, and it sits comfortably among the best robot vacuums for mopping.

There are a handful of sacrifices to be made, in terms of noise and fine debris, for the slightly lower 2-in-1 price, but overall the eufy Omni C28 punches above its weight in ways that matter. Read on to find out more.

The One-Minute Summary

The eufy Omni C28 is a well-built robot vacuum that punches above its weight. It handles everyday cleaning reliably, mops hard floors well and automates enough of the maintenance side of things to feel like it's earning its keep.

The dock takes care of emptying, mop washing and drying after every clean. In testing, a full week passed without needing to do anything beyond refilling the water tank, and the filters are still going strong after weeks of daily use.

Hard floors are where the C28 is the most convincing. During tests, as well as everyday use, stains were removed first time, without streaking, and the robot made vacuuming larger debris look easy. It was particularly good at handling pet hair and dander on both hard floors and when cleaning carpets, especially on deep clean mode. Fine debris like sugar was more hit and miss but setting the robot to double up its run easily solved that.

The app is clean and easy to navigate once you're familiar with it, although it can feel a little sparse on finer controls. There's no per-room suction adjustment, for instance, which feels like a missed opportunity at this price and it's not possible to just mop – only vacuum then mop. The dock is chunky and needs a permanent home with clear space around it but it's notably more compact than some rivals including the Roomba Combo Max 705. If space is tight, the slimmer Roborock Q7 M5 is worth considering.

At $799.99 the Omni C28 represents solid value for a robot with this level of automation and mopping capability. You're paying for a machine that reduces the cleaning load rather than adding to it, and for most homes it delivers on that. If the price is still a stretch, the C28's sister robot, the eufy Omni S1 Pro is a close alternative worth looking at.

eufy Omni C28: Specifications

eufy Omni C28: Setup

Setting up the eufy Omni C28 is easy because eufy packs everything neatly in the box. The robot, Omni Station, water tanks and documentation all sit in separate layers so lifting out each component takes seconds and assembly takes minutes.

The dock itself just needs its detachable base clipped into place and the protective films removed before putting it in place. Eufy recommends leaving 0.5 meters on either side and roughly 1.5 meters in front so I placed mine along the side of my kitchen island which left enough room for the robot to dock and leave comfortably.

As soon as you place the robot on the dock it powers on automatically and begins charging. A full charge takes around 3.5 hours, although the robot began its mapping run well before reaching full battery during our setup.

Next comes the smart home setup. Download the Eufy app, connect to a 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network – the app is very particular about this – and follow the pairing prompts. In my case the robot appeared in the app instantly and connected on the first attempt, which is rarer than it should be when setting up robot vacuums. At no point did I experience errors or the frustrations I've had with other robot vacuums recently – namely the Roomba Max 705.

Once connected, the C28 performs a mapping run to learn the layout of your home. This first pass scans the space rather than cleaning it, using the robot’s LiDAR navigation system.

I opened all the interior doors and moved a few shoes and cables out of the hallway before starting the run and the robot worked methodically around the rooms, tracing walls first before filling in the center of each space in about 20 minutes. It created a clean floor plan that required only a few small boundary adjustments.

After the map appears in the app, you can divide rooms, draw no-go zones and customise cleaning preferences before starting the first proper clean. The room layout looked accurate from the start, and drawing a no-go zone over the dog’s water bowls took only a few seconds.

The final step involved filling the clean water tank and the eufy Omni C28 was then ready to start deep cleaning my home. This whole process took no more than 30 minutes, including the detailed mapping run.

eufy Omni C28: Design and Features

The Eufy Omni C28 looks like a typical robot vacuum – a low, round disc with a LiDAR turret on top. This turret is fixed in place, unlike the retracting turret on the Dreame Aqua10 Ultra Roller, which can prevent the C28 from cleaning under low-profile furniture.

There are two physical buttons – one to start and stop the robot and one to make it return to the base. There's additionally a panel on the top of the robot which hides a small compartment that clips in and out and which houses the onboard filter.

Flip the robot over and you'll find two counter-rotating brushes that pull dust, dirt and trapped debris from corners toward the center suction channel. A wide main mop roller then sits top-center.

This roller spins as the robot moves which means it cleans dirt from hard floors, rather than dragging it, and retracts fully to keep the wet mop off your carpets as the robot moves between rooms.

Navigation comes from the LiDAR sensor plus both front-facing and rear-facing laser sensors, which scan the room to build a 360-degree map of your home.

The dock is large and bulky, as is standard, but it takes up less space than other robot vacuums I've tested, namely the Roomba Combo Max 705. The clean and dirty water tanks sit side-by-side on top of the dock, and then the washing and drying system for the mop is built into the base. The dock handles emptying, rinsing, drying, and refilling automatically, so you rarely need to interact with the robot itself.

Most of the robot and dock's other features live inside the eufy app. The app itself is dark-themed and cleanly laid out. The home screen keeps things simple with a large card showing the robot's current status and battery level, a one-tap start button and smaller tiles below for scheduled tasks and dust bag capacity. It doesn't feel cluttered, and the most-used controls are easy to reach without digging through menus.

From the map screen you can divide rooms, draw no-go zones, set no-mop areas for carpets, and direct the robot to clean specific rooms on demand. You can also schedule regular cleans, adjust suction power, and control how much water the mop uses. It's a well-laid-out app that isn't overwhelming – like the Dreame Aqua 10's app – and doesn't take long to get comfortable with.

That said, it does have its limitations. There's no per-room suction which feels like a missed opportunity at this price. If you want more power in the kitchen and less in the bedroom, for example, you're running them as separate cleans. There's also no option to just mop – you either set it to vacuum, or vacuum them mop. Neither issue is a dealbreaker but they are a little disappointing.

If you'd rather skip the app, or want more hands-free control, the C28 additionally works with Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. To set it up, open the eufy app, tap the menu in the top left corner, and select Smart Integrations – from there, on-screen instructions walk you through linking whichever assistant you use.

What Is the eufy Omni C28 Like to Use?

Day-to-day, the C28 is a largely (and thankfully) hands-off machine. Once the map is built, the app becomes the main way to run it and it's straightforward enough that most settings are easy to find without much poking around.

You can switch between House, Room, and Zone cleaning modes, adjust suction across three levels, and set the mop's water flow to low, medium, or high. Scheduling works across any day of the week, and a Do Not Disturb window silences the robot and pauses automatic dust collection during set hours.

This is handy if the station lives near a bedroom or you'd rather not hear it cycle at 6am because it's not the quietest of robot vacuums I've tested.

At 57dB on Quiet mode, the robot is silent enough to clean carpets during a call or in the background while working. Turbo and MAX modes are noticeably louder – 69dB and 73dB respectively – which is more in line with a traditional vacuum and much more noticeable, although not distractingly so.

The loudest the eufy Omni C28 gets is when it's emptying the dustbin, pushing the decibels up to 85dB on average, but it's a short blast rather than a constant noise. Then, a loud noise comes from the dock as it cleans the mop before the station starts humming as it dries the mop. This hum isn't loud but it lasts for hours and once you notice it, it's hard to ignore it.

The map the eufy app builds is detailed and, in testing, matched the actual layout of my home well. We have a drum kit in the living room and while other robot vacuums have struggled with navigating it, the eufy Omni C28 had no problems mapping the correct shapes.

Rooms divide automatically, and while the labels it assigns aren't always intuitive, a few minutes spent tidying the floor plan before the first full clean pays off. No-go and no-mop zones draw directly onto the map and stay put between sessions. From there the robot works methodically, moving in tight rows rather than the erratic bounce-and-correct approach of older models – you can see it making progress rather than wondering where it's going.

Obstacle avoidance is decent but not foolproof. It handles chair legs and furniture bases reliably, slowing and steering around them without fuss. Smaller things on the floor, like messy cables or a shoe left in a doorway, are less consistently spotted and can cause it to stall or reroute. During one test, it managed to pick up my son's headphones – the cable was hanging over the edge of a windowsill – and dragged them around until I noticed.

The bumper manages the odd light contact without drama, and furniture rarely ends up shifted. Crossing between hard floors and rugs is smooth and despite having a tall threshold between the Karndean flooring in my kitchen and the solid wood of my hallway, the robot handled it without problem.

The carpet detection sensor does its job well, lifting the mop pad before the robot moves onto carpet rather than dragging it wet across the pile. Other models, namely the Roborock Q7, have in the past smeared stains onto my carpet after mopping.

Battery life is one of the C28's stronger points. Eufy quotes 251 minutes on Quiet suction in vacuum-only mode, and in testing this stood up, lasting over four hours – enough to cover our home in a single pass. Mopping brought that down to a little over two hours on the same setting, and MAX suction with mopping dropped it down to an hour and 10 minutes. It should also be noted that if the battery gets too low, the robot will return to the base to charge automatically before picking up where it left off.

If I was being picky, the app sends too many notifications for my liking. There are water refill reminders, low battery alerts, clean complete, all of which are useful at first – especially if it's something you need to intervene on – but can become annoying and there's no obvious way to dial back which alerts you receive. Other than turning them off completely, which is also not ideal.

eufy Omni C28: Vacuuming Tests

To test how well the Eufy Omni C28 vacuums, I ran a standardized set of tests on both hard floors and carpet, using sugar for fine debris, lentils for medium and cereal for larger pieces.

When cleaning hardwood floors and kitchen laminate, the results were mixed. Lentils and cereal were both picked up cleanly without being flung across the room. The cereal in particular was dealt with better than expected and rather than being crushed and left as dust on the floor, most pieces were lifted whole on the first pass. A few were nudged briefly before being collected, but very little was left behind.

Around the edges and baseboards, which can be one the hardest cleaning tasks to get right, the side brushes did a great job of sweeping debris inward rather than scattering it.

Similarly on carpet, lentils and cereal fared well, though not quite as cleanly as on hard floors. Coverage was consistent enough that a second pass wasn't always necessary and pet hair on deep clean mode was a genuine surprise on both hard floors and low-pile rugs . On thicker carpet, surface hair was removed well, although deeper strands occasionally needed a follow-up to remove the dander.

Across both hard floors and carpets, however, the Omni C28 struggled to pick up the sugar. In fact, it left large amounts of it behind – you could see the lines of the brushes running through it, leaving a pattern rather than a clean floor. A second pass improved things, but it never fully cleared and I had to manually sweep the floor to get rid of it.

One thing to note is that the eufy Omni C28 cannot handle is small rugs. I have a thin mat by my back door and it got caught in the rubber brush roller repeatedly to the point I had to remember to remove it before each clean.

All in all, the C28 reduced the need for manual vacuuming by around 60% over my testing period. Hard floors and rugs were handled well enough that I didn't have to vacuum everyday, although carpeted areas still benefited from a weekly run with a full-size vacuum, particularly for fine debris and dust.

eufy Omni C28: Mopping Tests

To test how the eufy Omni C28 handles stains and spills, I ran standardized tests on hard flooring using ketchup and mustard.

Both performed well – among the best mopping results I've seen from a robot vacuum at this price. Ketchup lifted cleanly on the first pass with no streaking and no residue left at the edges.

Mustard, which is thicker and oilier and is usually more likely to leave a trace, was handled just as well – gone in a single run without needing to send the robot back. In both cases the rotating mop lifted rather than smeared, which sounds like a low bar but is something a surprising number of robot mops still get wrong.

In everyday use, fresh spills like drink splashes, muddy paw prints, and general kitchen mess were also reliably cleared in one clean. The one failure was a dried coffee stain near my bin, which the C28 didn't – and couldn't – shift. No matter how many times I sent it over the stain.

The best way to get streak-free floors is to add a cleaning solution to the clean water tank before each run. Eufy's own floor cleaning solution costs $20.99 and is sold separately; the brand doesn't include it in the box as standard. You can technically use any compatible floor cleaner, though doing so could invalidate the warranty so approach with caution.

Considering Dreame gives you its standard solution and pet-friendly solution (plus spares of each) with the Dreame Aqua10 this felt a little tight.

For a home that's mostly hard floors, the mopping performance and stain removal makes a strong case for the C28. I barely needed to manually mop at all during the testing period and that's not something I can usually say about many robot vacuums, let alone ones at this price.

eufy Omni C28: Maintenance

For a robot at this price, the expectation is that it largely takes care of itself and for daily use, the C28 mostly delivers.

After each clean, the robot drives back to the dock where it automatically empties its dustbin into a built-in dust bag, washes the mop using water from clean water tank, and pumps the dirty water into a separate wastewater tank.

In practice though, this means the station stops odors and prevents mold from building up on a damp roller, and you can run the C28 daily without much hands-on intervention. The only real maintenance is emptying and refilling the tanks every few days depending on how hard the robot is working. You can check in on the status of maintenance, and keep track of any errors in the app if your robot vacuum keeps getting stuck or isn't working as it should.

The DuoSpiral brushes are designed to reduce tangling, and they do fare better than a single, but in a home like mine with long hair and pets, the rolling brush still needed attention every few days or so. It's not a difficult job, but it's a chink in the otherwise almost flawless armor of this robot's hands-free nature.

Beyond this, the app tracks all of the robot's components through its Accessory Services screen. This shows how much each part has been used – via a percentage – and how long it is until it needs replacing. Knowing how to clean a robot vacuum is important, especially if you want to extend its lifespan so this a small but useful addition. It won't reduce the physical work of replacing the parts, but it takes the guesswork out of knowing what needs attention.

How Does the eufy Omni C28 Compare?

the eufy Omni C28 is a mid-range vacuum cleaner that, on test, demonstrated the ways in which it outperforms many high-end robot vacuum cleaners.

The Omni C28 appears to be a stark upgrade from the eufy X10 Pro Omni, our favorite mid-range model thus far. Surprisingly, the Omni C28 can be found at a similar price when on sale, despite its stronger performance across the board. Find it for around $499.99 to $799.99 at eufy.

The eufy Omni S1 Pro has long been our favorite from the brand. The Omni C28 has stronger suction and more thorough mopping, but the Omni S1 Pro has stronger performance on pet hair, and no hair wrap. The eufy Omni S1 Pro is available for around $700 to $900 at eufy, depending on promotions.

How I Tested the eufy Omni C28

Testing a robot vacuum properly takes time and how we test vacuums reflects that.

I tested the eufy Omni C28 over three weeks in a home with a mix of hard floors and rugs and which contains children and a chocolate labrador. During this time, it replaced my regular vacuum.

To keep performance tests consistent, I set the robot to vacuum sugar, lentils, and cereal off both hard floors and carpet, while for mopping, I tasked it with clearing up ketchup and mustard stains. Noise levels were then measured using the DecibelX app across a range of settings.

Beyond the benchmarks, I used the scheduling and manual controls in everyday use to get a realistic sense of how much the robot reduced cleaning time versus how much it added back in the form of maintenance and intervention.

Next, learn how to choose the best vacuum for every home and budget.

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