The Mower Finder
Which robot mower should you buy?
The honest answer is: it depends on the garden. Not the brochure garden — flat, square, sunlit — but yours, with its bank, its shady corner under the neighbour's tree, and the narrow strip down the side of the house that still needs cutting. A mower that is perfect for one of those gardens can be a poor buy for another, and the difference is almost never the cutting deck. It is how the machine finds its way, how steep it can climb, and how much ground its makers say it can cover.
So tell the finder about your garden. Six questions, a minute or so, and it will match you to the wire-free mower whose published specifications fit your plot best — with the reasoning shown, in plain English, and any shortcoming named rather than buried. Prefer to browse instead? The small-yards guide and its UK edition argue every model out in full.
Question 1 of 6
Where are you?
It decides the prices, the units and the shops.
Questions about the finder
How does the finder work?
It asks six questions — where you are, how big the lawn is, whether it slopes, how much shade it gets, how it is laid out, and what you would like to spend — then scores every mower we compare against your answers using the manufacturers' published figures: rated coverage, slope limits, navigation type and typical prices. The highest score wins; if nothing fits perfectly, it shows you the closest match and says plainly which requirement it misses.
Will a wire-free mower work in my shady garden?
Very likely — but the type matters. Satellite-guided (RTK) mowers need a decent view of the sky and can lose their fix under heavy tree cover. LiDAR models map with light and camera models navigate by sight, so neither cares about the canopy overhead. Tell the finder your garden is heavily shaded and it will steer you to the LiDAR and camera machines for exactly that reason.
What if my garden is bigger than any recommendation?
Then the finder will show you the largest-capacity mower we compare and tell you honestly that it falls short. Coverage figures are quoted per version, and most ranges include a bigger sibling rated for more ground than the model we list — the LUBA 2 line, for instance, runs to versions rated at two and a half acres. For a genuinely large plot, also consider splitting the lawn into zones mown on different days.
Have you tested the mower you're recommending?
No — and the finder will not pretend otherwise. Every recommendation on this site is matched on specifications and published data, cross-checked against manuals and spec sheets, rather than on hands-on testing. We think a spec honestly read beats a test weekend faked; our methodology page explains the whole approach.
Or browse the guides
Best robot lawn mowers for small yards
Five wire-free mowers compared for US yards under half an acre — navigation, slopes, coverage and prices.
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Best for small gardens — UK edition
The same careful comparison in pounds and square metres, with British shade and damp taken seriously.
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How we compare
How MowMentor weighs specifications, what we do not do (a test lawn, for a start), and how the money works.
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