PUDU vs Gausium vs CenoBots: 17 Machines, One Rule, Three Different Winners

Ask "which brand is best?" and the honest answer is: none of them, everywhere. Our catalogue holds specs on 19 machines, 17 of which are autonomous and comparably priced. Put those 17 on one derated throughput basis and one AUD footing, ask how much capital buys one effective m²/h, and three different brands finish first across the four machine classes. And the gap that surprised us most isn't a machine difference at all: two robots at the identical A$32,832 differ 2.5× in annual cost, purely because of the terms we amortise them over.

A comparison is only worth the basis it runs on

Vendor spec sheets are not comparable documents. Some makers publish a practical coverage range; others one bold "up to" number that assumes a straight line and an empty floor. Untouched, those don't rank machines — they rank marketing departments.

So every throughput figure below takes the midpoint of the maker's rated coverage, then derates it × 0.6 — or × 0.45 where our catalogue records that figure as a theoretical maximum rather than a practical rate. No vendor's private fleet telemetry enters the ranking. When we size a real fleet, one further × 0.85 covers in-window duty, applied identically to everyone.

That rule doesn't fall evenly. The tighter × 0.45 hits seven machines — Gausium's Omnie, Mira, Marvel and Beetle Pro, and CenoBots' L3, L4 and L50 — and no PUDU machine. Partly that's real: PUDU mostly publishes conservative cover-mode rates, and the MT1 is listed at 1,800 m²/h, not the 6,000 m²/h its spot mode claims. Partly it's a judgement of ours that runs PUDU's way — the MT1 Vac's 1,400 m²/h is published as an "official max" and still takes the × 0.6. Read as a maximum it would sit at A$45.6 and lose the vacuum class outright.

Prices sit on one AUD ex-GST footing, but not one line of arithmetic. Twelve of the 17 are published US retail figures, converted and taken to 90%. Four Gausium models come from a retailer whose base configurations run ~20% under those figures, so we level them up first — an adjustment that only ever moves a Gausium price upward. PUDU's MT1 Max has no US listing and is priced from the Australian dealer card plus 5%. Four sources, three formulas: read any gap of a few percent below as a tie, not a result.

First question: can the brand even build what you need?

Before price, before throughput: does the vendor make an autonomous machine in your class at all? Only one of the three does, in all four.

The empty scrubber cell catches buyers out. PUDU does list a machine that only washes — the SH1 — but it's an operator-pushed upright, not a robot: someone walks it the whole run, so it's excluded from every number here. Need an autonomous machine that only washes? Gausium or CenoBots. Want both in one pass? PUDU or Gausium.

Three entries come with a caveat: our catalogue can't fully confirm the CenoBots L50 and SP50 specs, and the PUDU BG1's manual isn't on file. No list we price from carries the BG1 either, so it appears in no chart below.

The capital-efficiency test

Indicative price ÷ derated coverage rate gives one comparable number: dollars of capital per effective m²/h owned. Here's each class leader.

In three of the four classes the spread inside a class dwarfs the gap between the leaders. In vacuums PUDU's MT1 Vac at A$34.2 and the CenoBots SP50 at A$37.5 are close, while the Gausium Vacuum 40 at A$159.6 is 4.7× the leader. In scrubbers the L3's A$36.2 sits against the Scrubber 75P's A$208.2 — but the 75P is a 400 kg industrial machine sold into a different problem, which is why this metric shortlists rather than decides.

The exception is the sweeper class, and it's the one our own adjustments decide. On the basis above the MT1 leads at A$24.1 and Gausium's Beetle Pro sits at A$29.3 — a 22% gap. But both of the engine choices behind that gap land only on the Beetle Pro. Undo the × 0.45 derate and it leads at about A$22. Undo the +20% price levelling alone and it sits at A$24.4 — a 1.4% gap, which our own rule says to read as a tie. Sweepers are contested, not won.

Then the service window re-ranks the combo class

Sticker price is a snapshot; the term you amortise over is the cost. Our engine assumes 5 years for PUDU, 3 for Gausium, 2 for CenoBots. PUDU's five is a figure on an Australian distributor card that also lists a one-year included warranty, so even that leg needs confirming; the three and the two are our working assumption. Treat them as an input to challenge with your supplier, not a fact about the machines.

Across all four classes the assumed term changes the leader exactly once — here. The Gausium Mira wins on sticker efficiency at A$54.3 per m²/h against the PUDU CC1's A$59.0, and keeps that win at any term both brands share. It loses only when Gausium's three years is set against PUDU's five: A$18.1 to A$11.8. Nothing about either machine changed. Only the denominator did.

Push that to its cleanest form and you get the headline. The PUDU CC1 Pro and the CenoBots L3 carry the identical A$32,832 price — one a combo, the other a stand-alone scrubber — so the gap between A$6,566 and A$16,416 a year settles nothing between them. It shows how much of a "price" is really a term: if a quote doesn't say what you're covered for and for how long, you don't yet have one.

What the numbers still don't decide

• Water infrastructure. An auto-refill dock needs a water supply and a floor drain. The PUDU CC1 and CC1 Pro, Gausium Phantas, Omnie, Scrubber 50 Pro and Scrubber 75P dock that way; the PUDU SH1 and BG1, Gausium Mira and Marvel, and the CenoBots L3, L4 and L50 don't — someone fills and empties them by hand.
• Multi-floor autonomy. Only seven machines integrate with a lift: PUDU's MT1, MT1 Max and MT1 Vac, Gausium's Omnie and Scrubber 50 Pro, CenoBots' L4 and L50.
• Same rating, same size. The CC1 and CC1 Pro share one 700–1,000 m²/h rating, so they size identically — a fleet plan giving you fewer Pros than CC1s is wrong.

Run it in that order and the vendor question mostly answers itself.

• Size the right class and see the payback on your own numbers with the Fleet & ROI Planner.
• Or tell us about your site and we'll come back with a vendor-neutral shortlist on this exact basis.