Roborock Saros 10 vs Roborock Saros 20

Roborock's FAQ for the Roborock Saros 20 lists its upgrades over the Saros 10R, not over the Roborock Saros 10, and the difference matters: the Saros 20 trades the Saros 10's vibrating mop and LiDAR for spinning pads and time-of-flight sensors. What they share is the same 350 × 353 mm footprint, a height of 79.8 mm that the Saros 10 reaches by lowering its LiDAR (93.5 mm raised, on Roborock's American page), a 6,400 mAh battery and a DuoDivide main brush. Both leave the mop at the dock and boost suction for carpet, both recognise pets with their camera, and both docks empty the bin, wash the mop in hot water, dry it, refill the robot's tank and dose detergent; for the Saros 10, Roborock names the last three on its model pages rather than its shop page.

Where the two differ on a figure Roborock gives for both, the Saros 20 is ahead on all but one: 36,000 Pa against 22,000, a single sill of 45 mm against 30 mm and a double one of 45 plus 43 mm against 30 plus 10; 30 mm is the lowest figure our ranking for high door thresholds admits. The Saros 20's two spinning pads press down at up to 13 N and FlexiArm extends the mop into corners, where the Saros 10 has a vibrating mop at up to 8 N and a separate edge mop that lowers only at edges. On the dock side, the Saros 20 washes the pads at up to 100 °C against 80 °C, and Roborock also names a dust-bag dryer for it, which its Saros 10 pages do not mention; the one figure that favours the Saros 10 is the drying air, up to 60 °C against 55 °C. Roborock gives the Saros 20 more than 300 recognised obstacle types, and no count for the Saros 10's structured light and RGB camera.

Three rows of the table cannot decide it. Roborock publishes neither a runtime nor a bin size for the Saros 10, so those two cannot be compared. The warranty row, which also feeds our reliability subscore, compares two shops rather than two robots: Roborock's British shop gives two years on every new vacuum and its American shop one, whichever Saros you choose. And our engine counts suction only up to 15,000 Pa, so the gap between 36,000 and 22,000 Pa, wide as it reads on paper, adds nothing to the score, and both boost suction on carpet. The score card beside this verdict has both Verdict Scores, and the rows under it break them down.

The Saros 20 earns its keep where sills are above 3 cm and up to 4.5 cm, or where there is a lot of hard floor to mop. In a mostly vacuumed flat with low sills, the Saros 10 gives up less than the figures suggest, and the price row below decides. If the vibrating mop is what you like about the Saros 10, the closer match in the Saros 20 range is the Saros 20 Sonic, which Roborock fits with a vibrating mop and the same Reactive AI 3.0 obstacle system.