Beatbot Sora 70 review: A (slightly) cheaper way to clean your pool

Best Prices Today: Beatbot Sora 70

The very best robotic pool cleaners aren’t cheap, with top models like the Beatbot AquaSense 2 Ultra going for close to $3,000. Recognizing that consumers want high-grade cleaning power at a more approachable price, Beatbot has taken a shot at a lower-cost offering with top-shelf features, and at $1,499, the new Beatbot Sora 70 packs a collection of the company’s greatest pool-robot hits into a less costly package. But what had to be stripped out to reach this price level?

Beatbot Sora 70: Specifications

The Sora 70 keeps the basic design aesthetic of Beatbot’s other robots, with a tall filtration unit perched atop two rolling treads and a pair of centrally mounted cylindrical bristles. If the device weren’t painted a soothing shade of purple instead of black, it wouldn’t really look any different than Beatbot’s prior releases. (A more traditional midnight blue option is also available.)

The Sora 70 weighs 23 pounds and features a 10,000 mAh battery that Beatbot specs with a maximum of five hours of underwater running time. Like other Beatbot robots, it can clean the floor, walls, and waterline of the pool — and skim the surface, too. Most of this is configurable via Beatbot’s mobile app, which offers five cleaning modes built around various combinations of the four zones in which it can operate (though that’s far fewer modes than you get with other Beatbot gear).

New to the device are four side guide wheels which are mounted to the sides of the treads and which help keep the robot from scraping against your pool walls. Two ultrasonic sensors also help with navigation and obstacle avoidance, particularly on steps and stairs (the unit can operate in shallow water with as little as 8 inches of depth), though the robot lacks the camera-based debris recognition capabilities of the more advanced robots in the Beatbot arsenal.

When finished cleaning, the Sora 70 automatically climbs the wall and floats, which makes retrieval so much simpler (and which is probably the best argument for picking a Beatbot robot over another brand today).

Beatbot Sora 70: Installation and setup

The Sora 70 requires no setup aside from peeling off its protective film and some taped-on Styrofoam pads. It merely needs to be charged via the included A/C adapter and connected to the Beatbot app via a simple onboarding process; in my case, the robot was automatically discovered via Bluetooth when I brought my phone nearby.

While the device lacks the wireless charging capabilities of Beatbot’s more advanced robots, the Sora 70 features a new charger design that makes for easy connection without the need to unscrew grommets or deal with large rubber stoppers designed to keep water out. With the Sora 70, the charging block slides into a port that’s covered by a hinged door. When the charging block is removed, the door swings shut, keeping water out without the user having to do any heavy lifting.

With nothing to disassemble and no basket lid to open, getting the unit ready for its next run is extremely simple — making for perhaps the easiest clean-up I’ve encountered to date.

Using the Beatbot Sora 70

As usual, I tested the Sora 70 with both organic and synthetic debris, both on the floor of the pool and on the surface.

The unit can be configured from the app or via a switch on the front of the robot. Slide the switch left to enter Pro mode (cleans floor, walls, waterline, and surface) or right to enter Preset mode (one of the additional modes which you select in the app). Once you have the unit set to your desired mode, you can just drop it in the pool any time without having to do anything else.

When cleaning the floor of the pool, it was immediately evident to me that the Sora 70 didn’t do quite as good a job as its more expensive brethren, though it was difficult to say why. In the “clean everything” Pro mode, I felt like the robot just didn’t spend enough time on the bottom of the pool, and it consistently left behind about 8 to 10 percent of my test debris, typically missing leaves in the corners.

The unit did much better when I set it to only clean the floor and walls, and in this mode it captured 99 percent of test debris on the floor — though it took a full six hours to get it all. The Sora 70 is ultimately fairly methodical and thorough, but it’s quite slow, and it needs a lot of time to complete its work.

On the surface of the pool, the robot’s skimming technology has been fully revamped. Rather than attempting to suck all debris into its mouth while it cruises along, a new design uses two water jets on its front corners to push leaves to the edges of the pool, only capturing smaller debris as it skims back and forth. After multiple passes, it then does a victory lap around the edge of the pool to suck up everything it pushed out of the way. In practice, this worked well with debris that was prone to floating. The small, thick leaves of a Texas live oak were readily snapped up by the Sora 70, but the vast majority of my silk synthetic leaves and more delicate debris like flower petals, both of which sink much more readily, were scuttled by the water jets and sank to the bottom of the pool before they could be collected. Ultimately, your success with this feature will entirely depend on the type of debris your pool collects.

The unit has a lengthy running time, but oddly, the first time I ran the robot in Max mode, which is supposed to run until the battery nearly dies, the robot operated for only three hours before quitting, with the app indicating 54 percent of its battery life still remained. After a firmware update, the robot started running for much longer — over 6 1/2 hours in total — before calling it quits — though in Pro mode more than half of that was on the surface.

Note that the robot will need to be on land or the surface of the pool to interact with via the app; after you drop the robot into the water, its operating mode can’t be changed on the fly due to range issues. Fortunately, since the robot does rise to the surface when its work is complete, it is able to send a notification to the app to let you know to retrieve and clean it. A simple remote control system is also available when the unit is on the surface of the pool.

Lastly, after each run, cleaning is easy thanks to an open, single-basket design which pops out quickly from a top-mounted hatch. With nothing to disassemble and no basket lid to open, getting the unit ready for its next run is extremely simple — making for perhaps the easiest clean-up I’ve encountered to date.

Should you buy the Beatbot Sora 70?

At $1,499, the Sora 70 is far cheaper than other Beatbot robots, but it’s still in the premium price band, slightly outpacing the $1,398 Polaris Freedom Plus, one of our top high-end picks. The Sora 70 has at least two features that the Freedom Plus lacks, however — surface skimming and automatic waterline retrieval — which makes choosing between them a very difficult choice.

My ultimate advice is that, if you have the budget, Beatbot’s AquaSense robots are definitely better performers and are worth the extra outlay, but if you can’t justify the extra expense, the Sora 70 makes for a good second choice. If you don’t need surface skimming, you can safely stick with the Polaris Freedom Plus.