Shark vs Dyson Cordless Vacuum Face-Off!

It comes with both a fluffy roller head for bare floors and a brush for carpeting along with a wide assortment of other attachments. If you’re not a fan of wall mounting your vacuums, the Samsung stores and charges in a free-standing caddy. Dyson’s entry-level sticks, including any variants from the V8 and the semi-discontinued V7 series, are the most affordable cordless vacuums with enough power to dig clingy dust and hair out of most rugs. Other vacuums offer more battery life, comfier handling, and better bare-floor pickup. And we found some evidence that the V8 in particular is less reliable than many other cordless vacuums. But if you think effective carpet cleaning is a vacuum’s most important job, a Dyson is the best option for your money.

Detach the lightweight hand vacuum in seconds and take on dust, pet hair, and more above the floor. Millie is the Small Appliances and Cooking Editor at Real Homes, and has also turned her hand to vacuum reviews at home. Previously she has written for Ideal Home, Real Homes and Homes & Gardens as our Appliances Editor. She has tested out a number of vacuums in this guide, including the Shark UltraCyclone Pet Pro Plus Cordless Handheld Vacuum Cleaner, which is a great pick for homes with pets.

shark cordless

However, it’s worth noting that the listed run time is based on using your vacuum in standard mode. If you switch on high power, max power or boost modes, the battery won’t last quite as long. You’ll find “bargain prices” on older Dyson vacuums (the lower the “v” number, the older the Dyson model) but the Dyson v7 and v8 are are much less powerful than the newer Dysons. If you chose not to buy a Dyson v10 or v11 because of the price, in my opinion it’s better to go with one of the newer Sharks than the older Dysons that are a similar price. Full-sized vacuums face a more challenging embedded-dirt test, in which our engineers try to clean up sand that has been ground into pile carpet. She’s an experienced product researcher with years of experience in covering large and small appliances.

That covers three types of floor surfaces, too; hardwood (99.59%), low-pile carpet (78.53%) and mid-pile carpet (71.57%). Some cordless vacuums made by Shark have specially designed brush rolls that hair doesn’t get tangled around. If you have long-haired pets or humans in your household, this keeps you from regularly having to cut hair from the brush roll. Another difference between the cordless vacuums I tested is in dustbin size – both Dysons I tested have double the size dustbins as the Sharks. The dustbins for the Dysons hold 0.8 quarts while the dustbins for the Rockets hold 0.34 quarts.

Notably, you can also make this vacuum more compact for storage, since the handle can fold in half. Its canister converts into a handheld vacuum you can use, too, but our tester found the handheld vac to be decently heavy. It may be fine for grabbing a few cobwebs, but don’t expect to use it overhead for a long time.

Some vacuums also do better with certain types of flooring than others. Dyson has made a version of the Fluffy head for a half decade . A Fluffy comes packaged with some V7 and V8 models, and it will work with the V10 and V11 if you purchase the head separately. But the Fluffy that comes with the V15 is a souped-up version of the old design; it’s one of the lowest-profile cleaning heads we’ve used, which helps it sneak under shelves and other furniture. We pay close attention to how comfortable it is to clean with each vacuum; several of our picks rank among the easiest-to-handle models that also offer good cleaning performance for the price.

The first is the Hoover OnePwr Evolve Pet, which is sort of an updated version of the Linx available for a similar price ($150-ish). It had respectably strong suction in our tests and dyson robot vacuum worked okay on rugs, but not nearly as well as the Black+Decker Powerseries Extreme that we recommend. And like the Black+Decker, this Hoover model is a snowplower on bare floors.