LG - CordZero™ All in One Cordless Stick Vacuum with Auto Empty, Power Mop Pro & Dual Floor Max Nozzles (A949KTMS)

First a not on self empty systems. They are sort of a gimmick. Firstly, they usually can do a basic empty of the container but they are not effective at cleaning the internal filters of the stick vac, that still has to be done really regularly yourself. And many self empty systems are themselves bagless, which means you have an additional 2 or 3 filters to clean. Bringing the total maintainence burden up to 2 dust containers, 2 mesh screens, and up to 5 or 6 filters you have to clean every couple weeks yourself! In other words, they're often more trouble than they are worth. Secondly, no cordless vac is going to match the suction and durability of a corded vac. With that in mind, and if you're good with it lasting about 5ish years, here's what I'd look at. Models from LG, including their own self empty model which at least uses bags, so there's nothing to clean on the station. Dyson have a pretty poor reputation for reliability now, but if you can tolerate very poor customer support, models like the v11 are still decent. V8 is a good more budget end choice. Miele duoflex or triflex models are great choices too, better quality than the others I think with good performance, but pricy and with fairly small bin capacity. Avoid no-name or bizzarely named models on Amazon, avoid bissell, hoover, dirt devil, shark, tineco, etc.

We have an LG cord zero from 2019 and it has been great. It comes with 2 batteries and we did have to replace those, but have had zero problems.

We use the shark robot as maintainance cleaning, then have an LG kompressor for our primary cordless. It self empties, stores a lot of fur, and the battery is changeable so we can run it on high then swap to a fresh battery if it dies. It came with a mop scrub head which is a bit gimmicky but does work for spot scrubbing. It has a pet head for furniture too.

LG CordZero, has swappable batteries, some models have a dedicated dustbin on the charger, and it has a variety of tools for hard and carpeted floors. I've been using mine for 4 years now. The trigger is a bit better designed than the Dyson V7 I had before.

I have the LG CordZero - HORRIBLE!!! Always gets clogged, never can use it for more than 10 minutes without dicking around with it. I'm buying a new vac which is how I found this thread. DO NOT BUY LG!!!!

Love my CordZero too. It's so easy to maintain because the cyclone is fully washable and so are the filters. Build quality is leaps and bounds above Dyson.

I've got the LG CordZero and it works great for all kinds of stuff.

IMO it's better to have a "meh" vacuum that you're using all the time than it is an amazing one that is too cumbersome to ever pull out. We got an LG CordZero for our 500 sq ft apartment (no pets) and it was excellent for that. We are in a larger house with a baby now and were given a Roomba, and that feels like the same "jump" all over again - being able to do an ok-ish job vacuuming without any effort has made our house so much cleaner than it was. With that said, if you *really* care about cleaning performance than a nice bagged canister vac (like a Miele) will probably be your best bet. But it's gonna be the same situation as you're in now. Oh, and personally I'd avoid Dyson. They are popular and can work well but build quality is atrocious and they intentionally design the batteries to fail early so you have to keep up buying expensive replacements.

Oof, classic Ryobi bait-and-switch. It is great for tools, terrible for vacs. If you’re looking for real performance under $500, start with LG CordZero, Tineco A11/A15 Hero, or a used Dyson V10/V11. If battery cross-compatibility isn’t a must, just get a vac that actually vacuums.

I picked up an LG cord zero for a little over 200 recently and so far I'm quite happy with it.