SwitchBot Floor Cleaning Robot S20 review

SwitchBot Floor Cleaning Robot S20: Introduction

• Type: Robot vacuum cleaner with mopping
• Docking: Self-clean dock with optional auto-refill station
• Navigation system: LiDAR + camera

SwitchBot is perhaps better known for its quirky smart home gadgets like its Multitasking Household Robot, retrofittable curtain motors and button pushers, but over the last couple of years it has been quietly building out a pretty comprehensive smart home ecosystem, with a full robot cleaning range too.

The S10 made waves for its plumbing-connected dock back in 2023, and now the follow up – the Floor Cleaning Robot S20 – has arrived, with a similar look but some nifty new tricks up its sleeve.

Currently on sale at a launch price of under $500 / £550, it’s less than half the price of the likes of the Dreame X50 Ultra and Roborock Saros 10R, and still comfortably undercuts mid-tier rivals like the Shark PowerDetect NeverTouch Pro.

That price positioning matters: while you don’t get every flagship trick, you do get a genuinely effective robot vacuum/mop that can cover the basics, and then some, without emptying your wallet.

I’ve had the SwitchBot Floor Cleaning Robot S20 cleaning my office for the past few weeks, read on to find out how well it performed.

Design and components

Put the S20 side by side with its predecessor, the S10, and you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart.

It’s a bulky, circular unit with a slightly dated look, with the three physical buttons up front – power, home and mode switch – and the Lidar tower up top.

With the likes of the Roborock Saros 10 coming in at under 8cm tall, the 11.5cm height of the S20 does seem pretty hefty.

As with all SwitchBot robo cleaners, the top panel comes off to reveal the physical power switch, access to the dustbin, and a hair removal tool.

The front of the robot houses the AI camera and front infrared sensor, and there is a side PSD too.

Around the back, you’ll find the water tank, which fills and empties itself from either the docking station or directly from your water mains.

SwitchBot, as it did with the S10, offers two docking options for the S20. The standard self-cleaning station (which I tested) and the plumbing-connected dock.

Both versions hide a vacuum bag and cleaning solution under a cover and come with a simple transparent floor mat. This mat is not nearly as premium as the furniture-sized stations from Ecovacs or Roborock, but it is effective enough.

Whatever dock you opt for, you’re getting 90-days of dust collection in the 4 litre tank before you’ll need to switch that bag out and the mop is dried with 50°C air.

If you go for the water tank option, you’ll have to fill up the 2.7 litre clean water tank every few days (depending on usage) and empty the dirty one too.

A word of warning on the latter, and this applies to all docks with such a system… the dirty water absolutely stinks if you leave it too long, so make sure to empty frequently. It’s like an egg sandwich that’s been left out in the sun all day.

It’s worth noting that the S20 is also compatible with the S10’s automatic fill station – which is handy if you’re upgrading and want it to work on multiple floors in your house. It also works with SwitchBot’s new Evaporative Humidifier dock too.

Back to the robot itself and, if you flip it over you’ll see where all the clever cleaning tech is housed.

The star feature is the roller mop system, which is similar to what we’ve seen from the (much-pricier) Ecovacs Deebot X8 Pro Omni.

Clean water trickles onto a constantly rotating mop, with dirt scraped away by a bar and suctioned into the dirty water tank.

It’s simple, effective, and means I never had to mop manually after a cycle.

An anti-tangle rubber brush underneath handles vacuuming carpets and rugs and there’s also the familiar side-spinning brush too.

Features

Setup starts at the dock, with the S20 pairing itself there before you connect it to Wi-Fi. You’ll need to use a 2.4GHz network, as there’s no support for 5GHz – so that may mean you need to temporirily turn of the latter if you haven’t seperated the bands already.

The initial mapping run was fast, but it didn’t automatically detect floor types, so I had to assign those manually.

Once that’s done, though, you get the full set of app controls you’d expect from a higher-end machine: splitting, merging, and naming rooms, creating no-go zones and virtual barriers, and even setting custom cleaning types per room (including setting tiles, or the floorboard direction for wooden floors).

Multi-floor mapping is also on offer but you will, of course, have to carry it up and down the stairs yourself (although I’d bet that SwitchBot has some sort of solution to this on show at CES next year… it’d definitely the next ‘thing’ in robo-cleaners; Eufy showed one off at IFA in September 2025).

The robot itself is unusually chatty, but in a good way; the onboard speaker is clear enough that its voice prompts are actually useful instead of just annoying.

The app mirrors what you’d find from the likes of Dreame or Roborock, with a maintenance area that tracks consumables like brushes and filters and reminds you when to clean sensors.

SwitchBot has also baked in AI obstacle detection, but it’s not especially reliable. In my testing, a bin was misidentified as a bathroom scales, and I found that I got the same AI result no matter what icon I tapped on, in the map section of the app (whatever obstacle type I tapped first).

So there’s still some work to do compared with the smarter systems from Ecovacs or Roborock but it did at least avoid objects like cat bowls and socks, which is the main thing really.

You can integrate the S20 with Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri Shortcuts, Home Assistant, SmartThings, Homey, and IFTTT. Matter is supported too, but only if you add a SwitchBot Hub to the mix, and at the moment Matter only works with Apple Home.

The docking station does its job well, but it’s far from discreet. Dustbin emptying is loud, and when the water tank refills you get a high-pitched vibration that’s impossible to ignore.

These are quick, short-lived noises, but they’re noticeably harsher than the muted tones of the pricier docks.

Performance

The S20 has three cleaning modes: vacuum only, vacuum and mop, and vacuum then mop – the latter being a new addition to the SwitchBot mix.

On hard floors, the S20 is excellent. It had no problem picking up crumbs, dirt, or dried mud, and the roller mop system is genuinely effective at lifting stuck-on mess without just smearing it around.

The steady supply of clean water makes a difference here, and the self-cleaning cycle ensures that dirty pads aren’t spreading grime back over the floor. It’s one of the better mopping systems I’ve seen outside the ultra-premium tier, and the results were good enough that I didn’t feel the need to mop manually afterwards.

Carpet performance is a different story. With its 10,000Pa suction, you’d expect strong results, but anything short of max power felt underwhelming.

It handled surface debris well enough, but for deeper cleaning you’ll want to stick to maximum suction, which of course comes at the expense of noise and battery life.

Corners are another weakness, as there’s no extendable side arm like you get on Roborock’s best machines, so dust can be left behind along the skirting. The side V-shaped anti-tangle brush did well getting bigger debris like hair into the dustbin, but crumbs were often left.

Your carpets will stay dry though, the mop lifts itself up and water flow stops when it detects carpets. There’s also a built-in wiper that removes excessive moisture.

Navigation overall was solid, with no missed rooms and reliable coverage even in low light thanks to the built-in LEDs around the camera lens. Go/No-Go zones and virtual barriers all worked perfectly.

It’s not flawless, but compared with other robots in its price range, it’s one of the better performers.

Yes, the docking station is noisy when doing its thing, but the convenience of automated emptying and water handling still outweighs the annoyance of a few loud moments.

Final thoughts

The SwitchBot S20 doesn’t reinvent the robo cleaner wheel, but it absolutely nails the value equation. For the current price of under $500 (although the official RRP is higher), you’re getting a vacuum/mop that cleans hard floors brilliantly, automates most of the grunt work, and hooks into pretty much every smart home system going.

It won’t dethrone Dreame, Roborock, or Ecovacs at the top of the ladder but it’s not really looking to either… it’s a great perfomer at its price-point.

Carpet performance lags behind, the design feels dated, and the dock is noisier than premium rivals. But, judged on what you’re actually paying, the S20 is a standout buy and one of the easiest recommendations I can make in the mid-range robo cleaner space.

How we test

When we publish our reviews, you can rest assured that they are the result of “living with” long term tests.

Robot cleaners usually live within an ecosystem, or a range of products that – supposedly – all work in harmony. And they are designed to offer a range of different cleaning options. Therefore, it’s impossible to use a robo cleaner for a week and deliver a verdict.

Because we’re testing smart home kit all day, everyday, we know what matters and how a particular smart cleaning machine compares to alternatives that you might also be considering.

Our reviews are comprehensive, objective and fair and, of course, we are never paid directly to review a device.

Read our guide on how we test robot vacuum cleaners to learn more.