For cleaning tight spaces, around corners and furniture, you need the best handheld vacuum cleaner. There are two reasons you might be looking for a handheld vacuum. First is that you want a second vacuum that's ready for spills or to use on the car, stairs or motor home. The other is that you want the most compact and lightweight vacuum possible, due to a lack of space, budget or desire to spend time holding something heavy in the hand.
Handheld vacuum cleaners generally used to corded. Then Dyson came along and made the compact, cordless vac fashionable. Particularly for small cleaning jobs, or cleaning jobs in confined spaces, not having a cord on your vac makes an awful lot of sense. Nowadays, with cordless stick vacs being the norm, the lines have blurred between handheld vacs and full-size ones. In many cases, all it takes is the removal of the tubular part of your cordless cleaner and suddenly it is a handheld vac – and vice versa.
What we've gathered together here is a mix of extremely compact handheld vacs – there's one here that is no bigger than a roll of kitchen towel – more traditional handhelds and the best cordless vacuum cleaners that can double as full-size floor cleaners and compact handheld vacs.
We also have some other guides you may find relevant. There are top 10 lists for [deep breath] the best car vacuum, the best robot vacuum cleaner, the best Shark vacuum cleaner and the best Dyson cordless vacuum cleaners.
Also try our guide to the best Dyson deals if you seek a bargain – and, of course, the best cordless vacuum cleaner overall. Yes, that is quite a lot of lists of vacuum cleaners.
But if you don't wish to get bogged down with heavyweight lists of vacuums, try this guide to the best handheld vacuum cleaners instead.
Best handheld vacuum cleaners 2024 ranking
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The Dyson Omni-glide fits squarely into the category of a handheld that is also a stick vac, so if you are absolutely determined to not have that functionality, please make your way to entry number 2 on this list. The Omni-glide is a worthy, if slightly pricey, winner of this category however, as it serves up excellent cleaning power. That's not only due to the motor, which provides more suction than its relatively sedate 50W of power would suggest, but also the excellent cleaning heads. You've got the 'Omnidirectional Fluffy' head that gives the device its name, and is superb for cleaning larger areas and a Mini Motorised tool that's perfect for upholstery, stairs and vehicles. The Combination tool – a mix of a brush tool for dusting and a crevice tool for, erm, crevices is less good but we’ve seen worse.
Despite the extreme length of the handle, this premium cleaner is the best handheld vac we've tested. Thanks to the Omnidirectional Fluffy head, it's also usable as a very capable full-size stick vac. It's specifically for hard floors but can also do a decent job on small-ish rugs that are not too deep pile.
Find out more in our full Dyson Omni-glide review
Although the new Gtech ProLite doesn’t have the suction power of the winning Dyson handheld, in many ways it’s a better investment for fuss-free handheld cleaning, mostly because it’s light as a feather (just 970g) while being yet easily powerful enough for shelves and overly dusty areas like fireplace hearths.
In fact, it turns out that this lightweight dynamo is brilliant for sweeping up fine ash and other microscopic dust particles without clogging up the entire system and damaging the motor. This is because it’s bagged instead of bagless. Try cleaning up the ash around a wood burner hearth with a Dyson or any other cyclonic bagless vac and the fine ash will completely block the filter in about three seconds flat. This applies to sawdust, too, and any other large amounts of powdery dust.
With this model, the airflow runs straight from the suction nozzle to a 500ml dust bag that looks tiny when empty but expands to three times its size when full. Like any bagged cleaner you simply throw the bag away and fit a new one – Gtech provides three in the box.
Suction wise, the ProLite always starts at full power but there’s a button on top to lower the suction for longer battery life – up to 20 minutes according to the blurb. Just behind this is the power button which isn’t the best design it must be said because it sometimes sticks and you have to tap it a few times to release.
The ProLite ships with a small round-headed circular brush and a detail nozzle, and that’s it. Personally, I’d have liked to have seen the optional Power Brush Head (£50 when bought as part of the Accessory Kit) supplied as standard. I’d also like to see Gtech manufacture a rectangular suction head for more efficient pickup. Other than that, this is a truly excellent little hand vac and definitely one of the lightest. Well worth a punt.
The great thing about this mini Shark – which is a scaled down version of the WandVac 2-in-1 further down below – is its sheer compactness. This titchy handheld vac is perfect for smaller vacuuming duties. Granted, it has one of the smallest bins of any vac on the market – just 0.1 litres – but then again it is only 39cm in length. Of course, this means it should only be used for those little emergencies for which it was designed, like collecting dust off the mantlepiece, ash around the fireplace, crumbs on the kitchen floor, etc.
Since the bin is so small, you will be required to empty it regularly and even give the little pull-out corrugated paper filter a bash against the inside of your dustbin to clear any remaining dust. Its 15 minute running time, meanwhile, is quite enough for most tasks you would use it for.
Despite its limitations and very shrill-sounding motor, a more handy vac is hard to imagine because having a model of this size to hand means you don’t have to lift out the hefty cordless stick vac, or worse, the corded vac when little mishaps occur.
The Shark WandVac is much more powerful than you’d think and the suction ramps up considerably when you tap the boost button. Honestly, for sheer convenience, this magic hand vac is a little titan.
Okay now this is a handheld vac. When I first saw the deodorant can-sized Roidmi P1 Nano Pro I laughed and thought, 'no way is this thing going to clean up anything.' How wrong I was. The P1 Nano Pro, despite its comically small size, is perfectly able to suck up spills such as rice and sugar, pretty much in one pass. Although as the nozzle is so small, it may take a while to deal with larger spills. We've used it for everything from cleaning up ash around a fireplace to sprucing up a motor home and this tiny thing delivers every time.
Of course, if you want to clean up larger pieces of debris, well… that ain't happening. And no way would any sane person attempt to clean their entire house with it. The bin is quite fiddly to empty as well as being, naturally, absolutely tiny. But for general dusting duties and cleaning up spills of anything that's no bigger than grains of rice, this tiny tube is a near miracle of modern technology. Oh, and it charges via USB-C, just to make it even more convenient to have around. Really, if you want a handheld that is truly compact, look no further than this titchy titan.
This handsome looking Shark is, like the Dyson at #1, both a lightweight handheld and a more widely useful stick vac. Not only that, but it comes with one of Shark's patented anti hairwrap cleaning heads, as well as a dusting brush and a small powered tool. Battery life of 16 minutes at most – more like 6-8 minutes if you're using one of the motorised heads and in Boost mode – isn't amazing. However, it's also by no means terrible, and what's really impressive here is that you actually get two batteries in this package. That's very good VFM, if you ask me, but if you want to get the price even lower you can opt for the WV361UK, which is the same great vac but with only one battery included.
The down sides to this dual purpose WandVac are that is makes a rather shrill noise when doing its work, and has a bin that is considerably more annoying to empty than Dyson's one. Given how much cheaper it usually is, you may find you can live with those minor shortcomings though. The handy docking station is another solid plus point.
Check our Shark discount codes to bag some savings.
The Gtech Multi Mk2 has been around for aeons by technology standards – around a decade, in actual time – so why would you still consider buying one? Firstly, Gtech was way ahead of the game when it comes to cordless vacuum cleaners and its batteries still give plenty of cleaning time despite the unit's age. Secondly, it is decidedly less, how can I put it? Less polite than the other vacs here.
Where the Dyson, Shark and Roidmi vacs above are refined and sophisticated, the Multi Mk2 is ready to get down and dirty. Its power brush head works well on hard floors and carpets, making Gtech's vac ideal for taking on car cleaning, nasty spills and ground-in dirt. Just be careful when emptying the bin the first few times, or you'll end up with another nasty spill. It's not the easiest thing to empty and you need to develop the knack.
Previous Bosch cordless vacs have been a bit iffy in terms of heft and looks. To be brutally frank, they were fatty boom booms. Not so the BCS122GB Unlimited, which is, if I may again speak frankly, a Dyson clone. But a very, very good one.
There are three absolutely fantastic things about the BCS122GB Unlimited and only one egregiously crap one. Firstly, although its battery life is fairly pitiful, Bosch gets around this by the ingenious means of… including a second battery.
As they charge fully in about an hour, these 18v cells should keep you vacuuming indefinitely, so long as you're judicious about charging one while using the other. Interestingly (or not, perhaps), they are also the exact same batteries and charger used in all Bosch's 18v power tool range, so you could use the same cell to drill a hole in a wall, and then suck up the debris.
The other selling points are that cleaning performance on carpet and hard floor is excellent, and well up to Dyson standard in real-life, day-to-day use (I try not to get too bogged down in seeing which vac can suck up one square metre of Rice Krispies the best.) It's even pretty passable without the turbo mode engaged.
Oh, and the long crevice tool. This looks absolutely ridiculous, turning the vac into a sort of robot anteater, but it is fantastically useful for cleaning skirting boards, footwells, down the back of the washing machine and so on.
The only real debit, if you ignore the rather premium price and slightly excessive weight, is the duster tool. Dyson has perfected this over the years and it's essential for cleaning dust, crumbs and, I dare say, one square metre of Rice Krispies off surfaces in a hurry. The Bosch one is rubbish. That aside, this is a near perfect cordless vacuum cleaner and one that will run and run.
You certainly get your money’s worth with this futuristic piece of kit since it comes with a main multitasking brush head with LED headlight, a mini power brush for sofas, car carpets and dog beds, a 2-in-1 dusting brush, a crevice tool and filter cleaning brush. But that’s just the half of it because the S11 uses sensors to detect the level of dust it’s in the process of devouring. This is beautifully illustrated in real time with a ring of light that surrounds the four-inch circular LED display above the handle. Depending on how much dirt is detected, the circle of light changes from mauve to red, or it stays blue if everything’s spick and span. I tried this out and, amazingly, the motor ramped up the suction and the colour changed from blue to red just as the brush head reached the prearranged section of heavy detritus. There’s even an app for this thing that provides a resumé of its performance though we’re not sure why you’d want to use it.
Despite the myriad of bells and whistles, when it came down to the tasks in hand, the Tineco proved to be exceptional in practically all disciplines, whether on carpets, hard floors, curtains, sofas or stairs. If you like tech for the sake of tech even if it’s a bit gimmicky, then this is the vac for you – it’s remarkably powerful, efficient and keenly priced for what it offers.
