Robotic mowers have come a long way over the last few years. The first versions required buried boundary wires that kept mowers in safe-zones but by 2025 there are so many high quality robot mowers that can effectively navigate a lawn without the use of a boundary wire.
The purpose of this article is not to identify the best robot mower or suggest any one robot mower is better than another. It’s not even to call any particular autonomous mower the best value. The purpose here is to help you identify which machines are best for your specific lawn…your specific property.
To get started you should know that I personally use the Sunseeker X3 Plus in my lawn…but only on my front lawn which is a mere 1000 sqft. I manually mow my parkway strip by the road because I don’t want to risk any mower falling into the road and I mow my 300 sqft side yard manually because I have garden plants that lean into the yard. Depending on the time of year or which way the wind is blowing I don’t get good coverage of the grass under those garden plants when using a robot mower.
I also don’t use the robot mower on the back yard because I have dogs that leave dog poo on the yard and I don’t want to have the robot run over dog poo between yard cleaning sessions. I typically clean the yard then mow manually. This also allows me to ensure small kid toys are not embedded in the lawn just before mowing.
As you can see I personally don’t think robot mowers have to be used everywhere, they are best used in areas that take the most of your time but are also simple to mow.
In this article I’ll be discussing mowers from the following brands: Sunseeker, Husqvarna, Lymow, Mowrator, Mammotion, Ecovacs, Yarbo, Segway, WORX, Greenworks, Dreame, and Gardena.
Most of these brands offer multiple mowers at different price points making it impossible to say one band is the best. To decide which is the beast for you we need to first look into your situation.
Ability To Handle Hills (Slope)
If you have a steep hill in your yard then you need a mower than can handle steep grades. It’s as simple as that. A high degree grade, all-wheel drive mower is what you need. You have to filter all other options out.
Because you cant really change a hill yard into a flat one then this is the first filter you must implement.
Within the Sunseeker line the X7 series mowers are AWD and the X7-6000 and X7-12000 can handle up to 25-degree slopes. The X7-300 can handle 28-degree slopes. As an example the steepest slope in my front lawn is near my shrub garden and the slope is at maximum 17-degrees.
If however, you had a truly steep slope though then the Lymow One mower can go all the way up to 45-degrees making it the best for this feature that I know of as of summer 2025. It’s not exactly all-wheel drive but the main drive train is built on wide tracks, similar to a tank, with a floating mower deck protruding out front on caster wheels. It’s got that low profile needed for slopes and it’s heavy making it more stable as it goes up and down hills.
I wish I had an affiliate relationship with Lymow but I don’t…but it’s still the best option for lawns that contain large grade differences. It’s even cheaper than the Sunseeker X7 series mowers.