Best Vacuum Brands of 2025
Who makes the best stick and upright vacuums? Our exclusive analysis covers Bissell, Hoover, Kenmore, Shark, and other brands.
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Finding the vacuum that works best for you can involve a long and convoluted search. First, you have to decide which type of vacuum is most suitable for your cleaning needs. If you’re a busy parent looking for a vacuum that’s lightweight and convenient, a stick vac is a smart choice. If you have a lot of carpet in your home, for instance, an upright with its strong suction power is your best bet.
- How to Use CR's Vacuum Brand Scores
- Best Vacuum Brands: Stick Vacuums Upright Vacuums
How to Use CR's Vacuum Brand Scores
When you’re shopping for a vacuum, you should first check out our vacuum ratings, which have detailed results for all the models we’ve tested. There, you can see our assessment of each vacuum’s performance and reliability, as well as the different features it offers.
If a model you’re interested in isn’t in our ratings, you can consult our vacuum brand scores here to gauge how well vacuums from a particular manufacturer tend to perform. You can also look at our guide to the most and least reliable vacuum brands, which will give you an estimate of how long a vacuum from a particular brand is likely to last before developing problems. Our reliability ratings are based on survey data of almost 136,000 vacuums owned by CR members.
Our brand scores are determined by a statistical model that incorporates the vacuums’ Overall Scores from our ratings. We factor in how well a brand’s vacuums perform in our lab tests and how reliable and satisfying they are to the CR members we surveyed. We also consider price. If a manufacturer produces vacuums that perform well at a lower price, it will get a boost in its brand score compared with a company that makes similarly performing models at a higher price.
We currently have brand scores for stick and upright vacuums. For both of those categories, we included only brands with at least three models in our current ratings. We do not have brand scores for canister, robotic, and handheld vacuums because there are not enough models in those categories to provide an accurate analysis.
For stick vacuums, brands that make more lightweight vacuums receive a higher score in our evaluation because portability is important for stick vac users. For uprights, we prioritize vacuums that come with features we find to be important in uprights, such as a full-bag or bin indicator, a HEPA filter, suction control, a retractable cord, and an on/off switch that’s easy to reach. We exclude from our analysis any brand that receives a subpar or abysmal reliability rating from our surveys. That’s because we generally don’t recommend any vacuums that have reliability scores that are lower than midrange.
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