Shark Matrix Plus review: A versatile, mid-priced 2-in-1 cleaner

Best Prices Today: Shark Matrix Plus

The Shark brand is virtually synonymous with floor cleaning products, with a lineup that includes upright, handheld, and robot vacuums. The Shark Matrix Plus is at the top of that last category, a 2-in-1 robot vacuum and mop that offers a versatile solution for all types of homes.

The Matrix Plus includes three components: the robot, its self-emptying dock, and a mopping attachment. A pair of spinning side brushes, mop pads, and a 12-ounce bottle of cleaning solution are also included in the box.

The Shark Matrix Plus excels in both vacuuming and mopping tasks while offering advanced navigation, a self-emptying base, and a user-friendly app

Design

The robot is predominantly black with subtle accents that give it a sophisticated look without attracting attention. It uses a single brush roll designed to handle various floor types, picking up pet hair, dust, and larger debris, with support from a side brush to clean along edges and corners.

The self-emptying dock is short and slim and includes a removable dustbin and a plastic snap-on mat that keeps the mopping attachment from dripping water onto your floors when the robot is charging. A HEPA filtration system ensures fine particles stay put until the dustbin is emptied. Shark claims the dustbin will hold up to 60 days of debris, but its actual capacity will largely depend on your usage.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best robot vacuums.

The mopping attachment has separate compartments for solid debris and water so you can vacuum and mop in a single pass. To use it, you have to attach a microfiber mop pad and fill the water reservoir. Convenient fill lines on the side of the attachment indicate the appropriate amounts of water and floor cleaner to use. Note that you can’t use the dock’s self-emptying function when the mop module is attached; you have to remove and empty it manually.

Setup

The SharkClean app is required to connect the Matrix to Wi-Fi and unlock the vacuum’s full functionality. Once you initiate the setup process, the app scans for the vacuum and prompts you through the steps of identifying your network and entering your login credentials. It took just a couple of minutes to complete, and I didn’t encounter any hiccups.

The Matrix does an initial exploratory run using LIDAR to navigate and map your home. This can take 25-45 minutes depending on the size of your space and involves the robot meandering around taking stock of the layout. My map run returned an accurate map with instructions to add room divisions and names, carpet zones so that the robot could avoid these during mopping, and any no-go zones I wanted to block obstacles or access to spaces I didn’t want to be cleaned.

Because you add these zones manually using bounding boxes, I was concerned about the accuracy of the carpet zones I created over a couple of area rugs. If they were too small, the rugs would get wet during mopping. If they were too big, parts of the hard floor wouldn’t get cleaned. Fortunately, the app includes a carpet verification feature. This essentially sends the robot on an exploratory run of the carpeted areas so it can accurately identify their edges.

Once the map is customized to your liking, you can dispatch the robot to clean specific rooms and to set scheduled cleanings.

Performance

Operating the Matrix is easy. You just install one of the two attachments, choose whole-home or room cleaning from the app, select a suction level—Eco, Normal, or Max—and tap the Start Cleaning button. When you select a single room, you have the option to perform a “matrix” cleaning. In this mode, the robot makes multiple passes over the floor in a grid pattern for a deeper clean.

My home has primarily hard flooring, so I used the mopping attachment for most of my testing period. Because matrix cleaning takes longer—sometimes three times as long as the robot’s normal cleaning—I used it only when cleaning the two rooms with an area rug in them.

The robot consistently demonstrated strong suction power, effectively picking up pet hair, dust, and larger debris. Its brush roll design is particularly adept at lifting debris from carpets. In our rice test, it picked up virtually all of the half-cup I scattered on the rug. The same test on hard floor yielded slightly less impressive results, leaving about a third of the rice behind.

The side brush isn’t great, and initially, it struggled to clear the pet hair and other debris from along my baseboards and wall corners. It did better when I increased the cleaning frequency to every 1-2 days rather than every three or so because there was simply less debris built up during the shorter intervals.

I particularly liked the Matrix’s mopping performance. Although it only uses a damp microfiber cloth, it wiggles the cloth side-to-side at a rate of 100 times per minute, simulating the agitation a human would provide using a stick mop. It was mostly successful in my testing, removing all but the most stubborn sticky gunk and stains, including a tablespoon of jelly I spread on the floor.

Shark doesn’t provide any specifics about the Matrix Plus’s obstacle avoidance, but it fared well in my tests. The robot skirted around pet food bowls, stray shoes, and a couple of tower fans and generally stayed out of trouble. It tended to roll over cords, however, and although it never got entangled, I felt it necessary to monitor the bot’s progress if I didn’t do a proper decluttering first.

One problem I frequently encountered early on was pet hair balling up in the robot’s dustbin. This wasn’t an issue when I used the mopping attachment since its dust compartment has to be manually emptied. But when I used the vacuuming attachment, the hairball would often block the outflow port during the self-emptying process, preventing all but the smallest debris from being sucked out. Here again, I solved the problem by cleaning more frequently to reduce the amount of pet hair the Matrix sucked up each cleaning.

The SharkClean app is intuitive to use with a clear interface that makes it easy to schedule cleanings, switch between vacuuming and mopping modes, and manage maps. On the rare occasions, there was an operational error, the app promptly notified me with instructions on how to fix it.

Should you buy the Shark Matrix Plus?

With its $699.99 list price, the Shark Matrix Plus (which was available for $579 on Amazon at the time of publication) is squarely in the mid-range tier of the robot vacuum market.

Given that it excels in both vacuuming and mopping tasks—efficiently handling pet hair, dirt, and debris—and offers advanced navigation, a self-emptying base, and a user-friendly app, it easily justifies the investment.

Best Prices Today: Shark Matrix Plus