Ecovacs X8 Pro Omni Review – rolling in with a first for robot vacuums with revolutionary mopping

I get it, you’ve seen one robot vacuum you’ve seen them all right? Wrong. They might look the same but there are so many factors that make the difference between good and great and in 2025 you really can’t be settling for just good. The new Ecovacs X8 Pro Omni is the first of several new robot vacuums to come from the industry leading brand over the coming months after being showcased at IFA Berlin in 2024 and CES Las Vegas in 2025.

Announced today, EFTM has been testing the Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni for a few weeks and the results once again so a dramatic leap forward in capabilities and technology.

Core to this is the new OZMO Roller, an industry first self-washing brush roller which looks like it’s come straight from an upright wet and dry vacuum and mop – because in reality it has. Ecovacs sister company Tineco makes a wide range of stick vacuums with wet and dry roller capabilities and that technology has been brought across to the robotics brand with utterly impressive results.

Ecovacs goes Eco with packaging

Thanks to new packaging regulations and an eco-friendly push from consumers, companies have been making huge changes in their packaging over many years with dramatic reductions in plastic and styrofoam packaging. This new Ecovacs X8 Pro Omni is I think the first large product from Ecovacs which I’ve noticed this shift.

Soft cardboard packaging protects the product inside the box, with the various components of the X8 Pro Omni layered between.

It just works, and that’s exactly what we want to see.

Year on Year evolution – Ecovacs X5 compared to X8

While the X8 Pro Omni Station is smaller, it’s deceptively so. Around the same height, the home station for the X8 is narrower and gives a sense of being smaller thanks to harder corners and that narrow profile.

I don’t have an exact measure on the volume of the clean water and dirty water tanks, other than to say that I poured a half full clean water tank from the X5 into the empty clean water tank of the new X8 and it didn’t seem to be quite half full, so I suspect there’s a bit of extra capacity there.

Setting up the X8 in the Ecovacs app

I’ve always been a fan of the Ecovacs app over many, many years of using it – and the process was smooth and simple here as always.

The scan of a QR code and we were off and running. Perhaps it was because I was early to access this device, but I did notice some areas of the app using Chinese characters instead of English in just one setting, but other than that it was smooth sailing.

As we always do, I cleared the floors – lifted all the chairs, side tables, bean bags and such – to ensure the robot could get a really clear map of the home, I think this is a really important part of the process for any self-mapping robot, let it find the real boundaries and then use the app to tweak your home’s map.

I do this by then inserting some virtual boundaries across doors I’ll not want it to go into, across an area of kitchen where we haven’t replaced the kick board and around the kids play room which is mess and a long thick fluffy rug which I think would be a task for any vacuum.

What I did love was the new (well new to me for sure) 3D modelling of your home. They tried this once before and it was ok, but this is a really cool way to view your home. Using two fingers to swipe the screen into 3D mode, similar to using Apple Maps, you can see a 3D render and twist it around to get a view of where your robot is.

That’s Great, but how well does it clean?

Yeah, look, all that is great, and is reflective of a premium product, but once it’s done that map and you set it off – things get pretty impressive.

Set to a standard clean mode, not even it’s deepest cleaning option – the X8 went out and cleaned every lick of hard floor we had.

You’ve got the option to set it to do your carpet areas first then mop, or just let it do it’s thing. I think that would be great for longer pile carpets which might just touch the wet roller brush, our rug is tight and thin so didn’t have that issue.

I watched its route and it really turns back on its own path to ensure the mop roller which isn’t the full width of the robot gets a chance to fully mop your floor.

What surprised me most was how it was able to do such a large area without constantly heading back to the Omni Station to refill the water tank. Given the roller is constantly getting clean water to keep it clean. It’s constantly spinning, cleaning itself while mopping your floor.

After letting the floor dry, I did a simple bare foot walk test and I’ve gotta say it felt cleaner than ever. Sure, year on year the change is perhaps incremental with these mopping technologies, but this was different, really felt like we’d given it a scrub.

The pressure the roller exerts to give that clean is an important difference to mopping vacuums which are really just dragging a wet cloth across the floor.

Thanks to the impressive 18,000Pa suction the debris bin on the X8 was full quite quickly for me, but that’s ok – back at home base in the Pro Omni station that’s all cleaned out.

In theory you could go 150 days without touching this vacuum, only heading to your vacuum to refil that clean water and clean out the dirty water tanks. I find myself doing that on average every week and a half, but we are sending our vacuum out on an almost daily basis.

Critically, this mop roller doesn’t smell. The Omni station uses 40-75 degree mop washing, and then 63 degree hot air drying. If you don’t do this right, you’ll get that stale smell – there’s no such issue on the Ecovacs X8 Pro Omni.

High-tech navigation on the Ecovacs X8 Pro Omni

One of the keys to the success of this vacuum is the larger sensors which allow the unit to see not just the walls, but the difference between the wall and skirting board.

What this ensures is that the unit knows where the edges are, and where the corners are.

Using this knowledge, your robot can extend it’s brush head out to pickup loose corn flakes, and critically the mop roller can move out from inside the unit to run along wise the “edge” of the circular device. I saw it getting within millimeters of my walls with the mop brush, outstanding.

I do see it now and then taking a wobbly path alongside an edge, but think this is in part because of my own virtual boundary setting and also the perhaps not quite square nature of the edge in proportion to the room. Not a real issue, but something strange you might see if you stare at the robot at work.

Frankly though, that’s the worst thing you can do – let it do it’s thing, don’t worry about how it does it.

Price and Availability of the Ecovacs X8 Pro Omni

The X8 will be sold at the same price as last year’s flagship model the X5 – $2,499. Strangely there are products selling for more than this on the market, but given this is without question the most advanced robot we’ve seen – I find it hard to understand how you could spend more.

Of course, you can spend less too – but as an investment in your home’s cleanliness and your own time – it’s worth it.

Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Onni will be available next week on March 5 from Bing Lee, Harvey Norman, JB HiFi other major retailers and Ecovacs online