Robot vacuum with mopping roller at an affordable price: Lefant M5 Pro review

The manufacturer's suggested retail price for the Lefant M5 Pro is 699 euros. It is available from Amazon, among other retailers, sometimes at a significantly lower price.

Lefant is known for robot vacuums with fairly basic features, which are typically priced lower than models from well-known competitors. With the Lefant M5 Pro, the manufacturer has been offering a model equipped with a modern mopping roller for some time now.

This mopping technology generally stands for very good wet-cleaning performance. Our Lefant M5 Pro review reveals whether this also applies to this model and what else the robot vacuum and mop has to offer.

Before we dive into the Lefant M5 Pro’s performance in our hands-on test, let’s first take a look at its features. What do you get for the MSRP of $800?

According to the spec sheet, the suction power is 18,000 Pa. That’s about half that of the current flagship models from Dreame, Roborock, and others—though most of those also cost almost twice as much. For an affordable mid-range model, this is a solid figure, even if some competitors also have a 2 or 3 in front of the five-digit number here.

A rarity in the 800-dollar price range, however, is the mopping roller at the rear of the robot vacuum. At 20 cm, it is relatively compact and also cannot be extended. However, it promises—at least in theory—generally better mopping performance than robot vacuums with the two classic mop pads. Especially since the roller, which can be raised by 8 mm for carpet cleaning, is also constantly flushed with fresh water and freed of dirty water.

On paper, the capabilities for navigation and obstacle detection are limited. Lefant does install a dToF laser sensor on the top, but it sits under a sort of “hood,” which prevents it from having a 360-degree field of view. For obstacle detection, there’s only a 190-degree PSD 2.0 sensor mounted on the front. There’s no sign of cameras, which are found in nearly all modern robot vacuums. This may sound good to privacy advocates, but technically it is not up to date.

The Lefant M5 Pro comes with the usual cleaning station. While the 75°C hot-water mop wash is quite up-to-date, the subsequent cold-air drying is less so. The compact dimensions stand out as a positive feature at first glance. At approximately 38 cm in height, the station is significantly lower than many competitors’.

However, this comes at the cost of significantly smaller fresh- and dirty-water tanks, with a volume of around 3 l. In other words, they need to be filled and emptied more often. The 3.2-liter dust bag for automatic dust extraction is on par with other models. There’s also a container for adding cleaning solution, even if it’s very basic in design.

Establishing a connection between the robot vacuum, the app, and the Wi-Fi network worked without any issues during testing. You’ll need an account in the Lefant app for iOS or Android. Once that’s set up, you can get started creating the virtual map of the Lefant M5 Pro’s new operating environment.

The detection of individual rooms worked well, though not perfectly. When editing the map, there are fewer options than with other manufacturers. However, important features such as creating virtual restricted zones and dividing and naming rooms are available.

As mentioned at the beginning, the laser only has a view toward the front. As a result, the Lefant M5 Pro occasionally spins around its own axis to orient itself precisely. While this isn’t ideal—but still tolerable—two other things bothered us even more during testing.

First, the robot vacuum sometimes wandered around somewhat confused and occasionally had difficulty finding its way back to the station for mop-cleaning stops during the cleaning cycle. Second, in practice, it unfortunately didn’t always reliably clean all rooms during a cleaning cycle, even though the path to them was clear. One room was frequently skipped during full-area cleaning, but was cleaned without any issues when the room was selected for targeted cleaning.

Our expectations regarding obstacle detection were already modest before we tested the Lefant M5 Pro. And unfortunately, we were not proven wrong. Although the robot vacuum is equipped with a 190-degree PSD 2.0 sensor on the front, it doesn’t have a camera at all. This not only prevents it from detecting messes such as water spots on the floor, but also makes navigation in difficult “terrain”—such as the area under a dining table crowded with chair legs—difficult and limited.

Furthermore, it severely limits the robot’s ability to detect LEGO bricks, cables, and similar objects. In short: small and lightweight objects, in particular, are not detected at all and are usually run over and dragged around. The M5 Pro didn’t even recognize a sock lying on the floor and navigate around it until it had already been pushed a few centimeters across the floor. That’s no longer really up to date—not even in this price range.

18,000 Pa and a mopping roller sound like solid cleaning performance on paper. And that’s ultimately what you get in practice—at least on smooth floors. However, compromises have to be made, especially with slightly thicker carpets. While the Lefant M5 Pro picked up most of the test dirt we spread—such as dog hair and fine sand—it also left behind significantly more than many other, though often more expensive, test models. The anti-tangle feature designed to prevent hair from getting tangled in the brush worked solidly, but not completely.

In our robot vacuum tests, we always have the device clean an area of about 50 square meters using medium suction and mopping settings. The Lefant M5 Pro took a good two hours to complete this task in our test. That’s a very long time compared to many other models, and it’s partly due to its navigation system, which isn’t quite fully developed.