Beatbot Sora 70

MSRP $1,199.00

“The Sora 70 offers a true ‘set it and forget it’ design that pays for itself.”

Pros

• Comprehensive cleaning coverage
• Great warranty
• Durable and reliable
• Proven brand trust

Cons

• Expensive
• No wireless charging dock included
• Overkill for smaller pools

Quick Insight

Beatbot hopes that the Sora 70’s new technology features will be enough to entice you over to the Beatbot brand, regardless of whether you have an existing pool cleaner, or if you’re in the market for your first. I can tell you that there are several features on the Sora 70 that are a first for me: The JetPulse water-surface cleaning technology, the shallow water and platform cleaning ability, and the huge 6-liter debris basket. Beatbot has done a great job being unique and intuitive with features that consumers will appreciate.

The Beatbot Sora 70 is priced in the $1,299 – $1,499 range, putting it squarely in between the Beatbot AquaSense 2 and the AquaSense 2 pro product lines. With the Sora 70, Beatbot has effectively stripped away some extravagant luxury features (like camera-based AI debris recognition and wireless dock charging) to hit a much more accessible price point. But crucially, they kept the features that matter to most people. This is a true 3-in-1 machine that scrubs the floor, climbs the walls, washes the waterline, and most impressively uses twin water jets to actively skim the surface of your pool.

In my two weeks of testing, I found the Sora 70 to be an effective pool cleaner with new technology that works as advertised, but it also came with some annoyances for me as well. It’s slower than some other pool cleaners, and it doesn’t come with a charging dock. Pet peeves for me, rather than performance issues, but I suppose they had to cut some corners somewhere to keep the price down. But what I do like is the massive 6800 GPH suction, all-in-one features that include surface cleaning, an extra-large debris basket, and the enormous battery life. Combined, this makes the Sora 70 a recommendation if you are in the market for a pool cleaner. 

Beatbot Sora 70 Specifications: 

Here is how the Beatbot Sora 70 measures up on the technical side: 

Design: Purple people eater

Apologies for the tacky section title, but I have a poor sense of dad joke humor. The Beatbot Sora 70 sticks with the company’s traditional purple casing color and design, which I personally find more attractive than some of the other pool cleaner brands – I think it looks cute and unique. 

Weighing 23 pounds, the Sora 70 feels solidly built. It’s relatively tall and mounted on heavy-duty continuous tank tracks, with dual-group roller brushes positioned at the front and the back of the unit. The top compartment pops open via a simple latch, revealing an absolutely massive 6-liter debris basket.

According to Beatbot, this cavernous basket can hold roughly up to 800 leaves. While I didn’t sit there and individually count the tree leaves it sucked up, I can confirm that it easily swallowed a weekend’s worth of storm debris without choking. 

The Sora 70 features an ingenious system of four internal floating chambers. When the battery runs low, or the cycle finishes, the robot expels its internal water, floats to the surface, and drives itself to the wall; a feature they call Smart Surface Parking. As you lift it out by the sturdy top handle, a SmartDrain system dumps the excess water back into the pool in seconds, much quicker than other cleaners on the market. You are lifting a little more than 23 pounds dry weight, but not 50. 

Cleaning performance: 3-in-1 gets it done

When you drop the Sora 70 into the water, you have to be patient as it takes several minutes for the unit to fill with water and then sink down. It sinks to the bottom and just sits there for a few minutes, calibrating its internal gyroscopes and mapping the environment before it fires up. But once it starts, the 6,800 GPH suction power immediately makes itself known.

I tested the floor cleaning abilities with several leaves, debris, and clumped up pollen that had sunk to the bottom of the pool. As you can see in my picture, it cleared a solid path through the debris without any issues.

I did notice that with some of the finer pollen that had been clumped up, some of it shot out of the top of the Sora 70’s fan. So does that mean the pollen was redistributed back into the pool? I’m not entirely sure, as it takes a while for the pollen to settle back down. But at the end of its two-hour cleaning cycle, the water looked clear and clean.

I also noticed that the robot is quite slow because it relies on an optimized S-shaped cleaning path. It is incredibly thorough, but in the “Pro Mode” (which cleans everything), it can occasionally miss small piles of debris tucked deep into the sharp 90-degree corners of the pool. It eventually gets them on subsequent passes, but it requires patience.

For my larger rectangle-shaped pool, I felt like the Sora 70 cleaned most areas within the original 2-hour setting I have it on, but I will definitely be setting it to 3-hours to make sure it does a more thorough job. With the Sora 70 set to clean the floor and walls within 2 hours, there was 67% of battery life left when it completed its job. That’s incredible, thanks to its 10,000 mAh battery. That would leave around 4 hours leftover to simply skim the surface of the pool to keep things super clean. 

Thanks to the continuous tank treads, it scales vertical walls with ease, stopping right at the waterline. Once there, it does a great job scrubbing horizontally to remove the nasty ring of sunscreen oils, lotion, and pollen that inevitably builds up at the tile line, and which is very visible on my dark blue tile in particular. I would say that the Sora 70 does an average job cleaning the waterline. The Aiper Scuba V3, for example, uses a water jet propulsion system to push its robot cleaner up even further on the waterline, cleaning almost an inch higher in some areas.  

One of the features I could not test was the shallow water usage;  I just don’t have a pool shelf in my pool. I do have stairs, and the Sora 70 did an OK job cleaning them, but was inconsistent with the quality of the work. In fact, there was one time when I thought it got stuck as it just stayed on the top stair for a few minutes with water jetting out, until it finally moved itself back into the pool.

I will make a point of stating that a lot of pool cleaners in general do a poor job with the stairs, and many are incapable of even getting up 1-2 stairs at all. The Sora 70 did a better-than-average job when compared to the others, as you can see in the picture. 

Surface Skimming Performance

One of the biggest selling points of the Sora 70 is its ability to clean the water surface. Most cleaners under the $1200 mark only clean the walls and the floor, but the Sora, being an entry-level premium cleaner, does all three. So if you want to save a few bucks on buying a separate skimmer and save some time, the Sora 70 could be great for you.

Beatbot is touting a new Jet Pulse technology to help with the skimming job. When the subsurface cycles conclude, the robot achieves positive buoyancy, surfaces, and activates its proprietary JetPulse technology. It utilizes twin forward-facing water jets to project streams outward and slightly downward. According to Beatbot, these two jets effectively create a localized low-pressure funnel ahead of the robot. This funnel draws floating debris directly into the primary suction inlet.

In my tests, I have clumped pollen and leaves floating around the surface, with the occasional bug. Operating in “Surface Mode,” the Sora 70 achieved an impressive 90% capture rate within 45 minutes, gracefully cruising the perimeter and corralling the material. While the JetPulse system is flawless with highly buoyant debris, it struggles with heavier buoyancy items. Heavy flower petals, waterlogged seed pods, and dense organic matter are occasionally subjected to the downward vector of the outward-facing water jets.

Once the force breaks the surface tension, these items immediately sink to the floor. This isn’t super common, but it can happen. Fortunately, the robot’s programming dictates it will eventually return to the floor on its next cycle to retrieve them, but it highlights that the skimming mechanism is optimized for dry, light debris rather than heavy, saturated yard waste. Nonetheless, having a single unit that actively manages the surface at all represents a massive reduction in total user labor.

Battery Life and Efficiency: Powering the Deep End

One of the main reasons that I like having a separate pool skimmer is due to the poorer battery life of the all-in-one units. Most robot pool cleaners provide 90 to 120 minutes of operation before requiring a tedious retrieval and a 6-hour recharge cycle. Beatbot addressed this by integrating an exceptionally large 10,000 mAh, multi-cell lithium-ion battery pack into the Sora 70.

Beatbot advertises up to 5 hours of floor cleaning or 7 hours of surface skimming. In my continuous-drain endurance testing, I set the robot to the most demanding “Pro Mode” (engaging drive motors, suction impellers, and active scanning) and allowed it to run from a verified 100% state of charge until the low-voltage cutoff triggered. The Sora 70 clocked an astonishing 6 hours, 21 minutes, and 14 seconds of continuous, uninterrupted operation.

Beatbot uses a very clever battery management system that is exceptionally intelligent. It actively monitors voltage drop under load, and when the capacity reaches 15%, it overrides all cleaning protocols, aborts the mission, and initiates the Smart Surface Parking sequence (moves the pool cleaner to the edge of the pool and notifies you on the app to come pick it up).

This fail-safe guarantees you are never left diving into the deep end to retrieve a dead unit. Recharging from 0% to 100% took around 4.5 hours using the included proprietary power supply. In a weird change, I noticed that the charging receptacle utilizes marine-grade titanium contacts, cleverly protected behind a waterproof, dual-gasket silicone flap, effectively mitigating the galvanic corrosion that inevitably destroys cheaper competitors. My preference would be for a wireless charging dock, which any pool cleaner above $1000 should have.

App use

The Beatbot companion app works on both iOS and Android. Connectivity is established via a dual-band Wi-Fi module (2.4GHz and 5G) alongside Bluetooth 5.0, offering a generous maximum theoretical range of 130 feet for Wi-Fi and 65 feet for Bluetooth when the unit is surfaced.

As I point out in every test, pool cleaners that are submerged will not have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connectivity unless it’s at the surface, or unless you have an accessory that broadcasts the signal under the water. Aiper has its Hydrocomm products, which float on top of the pool and will broadcast the Wi-Fi signal, but it’s pretty expensive. Beatbot doesn’t have an equivalent accessory, but it’s really not needed in my opinion. If you want to pull the cleaner out, just snag it while it’s cleaning a wall. 

The app interface is clean, data-rich, and highly intuitive. From the main dashboard, users have granular control over the robot’s operational parameters. You can select from five distinct cleaning modes depending on your immediate needs: Quick (Floor only), Standard (Floor, walls, and waterline), Pro (Full top-to-bottom coverage), ECO (Interval floor cleaning), or a Custom configuration. The software provides real-time telemetry regarding battery life, estimated time to completion, and a historical log of past cleaning cycles.

We were also impressed by the OTA (Over-The-Air) update capability, which allows Beatbot to push algorithmic improvements and refine navigation pathways long after your initial purchase. Another highly practical feature is the “Customizable Quick Button” setting—this allows you to assign your favorite app-configured cleaning mode directly to a physical button on the robot’s chassis for smartphone-free, offline deployments

One cool software feature is Remote Navigation Control. When the Sora 70 is performing its surface skimming cycle, the app transforms your smartphone into a virtual joystick. During my visual tracker tests, I was able to manually pilot the robot across the surface to hunt down specific clusters of leaves or directly trigger the one-tap “Surface Parking” command to call the robot to the edge for retrieval. It’s slow to respond, but at least it comes with the feature. 

Warranty

Beatbot backs the Sora 70 with a comprehensive 3-year replacement warranty. This is not a standard, pro-rated “send it to an authorized repair center and wait twelve weeks” policy. If the unit suffers a catastrophic manufacturer’s defect within the 36-month window, the company will replace the unit.

In the automated pool cleaner industry, where harsh chemicals and water ingress are the enemies of longevity, a 3-year full replacement guarantee is an exceptional indicator of manufacturer confidence. Aiper carries a similar warranty with its premium products. And for any pool robot over $1000, a three-year warranty is usually standard. Native pool equipment companies like Dolphin or Polaris offer very limited warranties. Beatbot stands above the crowd in my opinion. 

What I like about the Beatbot Sora 70

I am a big fan of the Beatbot brand; I think their products are well-designed, reliable, and simple to use. The Sora 70 did a great job cleaning my pool, and the battery life was exceptional. I like that the Sora 70 cleans everything from the floor, walls, and the surface. There isn’t a need for a separate skimmer if you don’t have the need to clean your pool surface several times a day. The debris basket is huge and lets you run several cleaning cycles if you want before having to empty it. 

What I do not like about the Beabot Sora 70

It really irks me that Beatbot cheaped out on the wireless charging dock for a pool cleaner that has an MSRP over a grand. This is not an insignificant expense, and the missing extra details really detract from the experience in my opinion. The Sora 70 is also slower than some other pool cleaners, so if you think you can just drop it into the pool right before entertaining, you’re in for a surprise.

Should you buy the Beatbot Sora 70?

The Beatbot Sora 70 checks the boxes for some very specific use cases. If you have a pool with a ledge or lots of stairs, the Sora 70 would be a great choice. If you do not want to mess around with a separate pool skimmer or simply do not need to clean your pool surface a lot, the Sora 70 is perfect.

The Sora 70 is a very thorough pool cleaner that takes its time, does a very detailed cleaning job, and proves to be a very reliable partner. As I mentioned before, there are some tradeoffs, like the wireless charging base, but those are more like luxuries than requirements for me when choosing which pool cleaner for my pool. 

Other options to consider

For me personally, I like having a separate skimmer, and Beatbot sells a great one in the iSkim Ultra, which uses solar charging and can essentially run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can currently purchase that with the Sora 30 in a package for $1298, which I think is a great deal. The Sora 30 has a huge debris basket, 6,800 GPH suction, and a monstrous 10,000 mAh battery, like the Sora 70.

How I tested the Beatbot Sora 70

I evaluated the Sora 70 over a two-week period using my 15,000 rectangular-shaped in-ground plaster pool, which is surrounded by trees. I tested each of the Sora 70’s settings, and picked up pollen, leaves, and various debris with random bugs. Battery run times were tested at a 100% charge and measured from the moment I put the Sora 70 into the water.