Reviewers rarely talk about reliability. Owners bring it up twice as often

• Robot vacuums: reliability comes up in 1% of reviewer opinions and 18% of owner opinions. A review covers a few weeks; the failures owners write about tend to come months later.
• Self-cleaning litter boxes: 3% vs 39%. Owners mostly describe breakdowns and how long a replacement takes.
• When owners do bring it up, 70% of what they say is negative. Reviewers who mention it are negative 15% of the time.

Reviewers and owners talk about apps, software and connectivity about equally often (8.2% vs 9.4% of opinions). They don't agree on them: 21% of reviewer opinions on apps are negative, compared with 71% of owner opinions.

Two products show where this ends up:

• A $7,999 laser engraver ranks last of 9. The Glowforge Pro gets 8 positive and 0 negative opinions on setup and ease of use. It loses on software and connectivity (3 positive, 7 negative) and on reliability and support (2 positive, 7 negative). Owners mostly object to a paid software subscription and needing an internet connection to use the machine.
• A $350 smart lock ranks last of 20. The Eufy FamiLock S3 has 0 positive and 7 negative opinions on its app and smart-home features, mostly about a firmware update that left locks unusable. All 10 of its sources are Reddit threads.

• Search owner threads for the model plus "months" or "a year later", not just the launch reviews.
• Check whether the device still works if the app or the company's servers go away.
• Look at the warranty length and how owners describe getting a replacement.

• Reviewers aren't hiding anything. Most reviews are made in the first days or weeks with a new unit. That's too early for most failures, and it's hard to test a company's support.
• Owners post when something goes wrong. Nobody starts a thread to say their robot vacuum still works, so these numbers show what owners worry about, not how often things break. For scale: across all topics, 56% of owner opinions and 15% of reviewer opinions are negative. Reliability (70%) and apps (71%) are still well above the owners' own average.
• Topic grouping matters. If we also count mixed topics such as "Value & Support" or "Responsiveness & Key Reliability", owners bring up reliability 2.4 times as often instead of twice, and more in all 17 categories that have owner opinions. We lead with the stricter number. The same goes for apps: mixed topics like "Connectivity & Battery" are left out.
• Some YouTube reviews are sponsored. We count them like any other source and can't reliably tell which ones are.
• An AI model labels each opinion with a topic and as positive or negative. Every opinion links back to the sentence it came from, so any of them can be checked.

• Sources: YouTube reviews and Reddit threads about 657 products currently on sale in 19 categories, collected for BettaScore's rankings: 8,062 opinions from YouTube and 4,525 from Reddit. Review sites, forums and Hacker News (517 opinions) aren't in the comparison.
• What counts as an opinion: one source's view on one topic of one product. A source that covers five topics counts five times; a source that mentions a topic ten times counts once.
• Topic groups: reliability is any topic about reliability, durability, warranty, service or support; apps is any topic about apps, software, firmware or connectivity. Mixed topics are left out of both.
• Shares: opinions in a topic group ÷ all opinions from that platform, including neutral ones. Negative shares count positive and negative opinions only.

BettaScore ranks products by what public reviews say about them. No brand pays to be listed or to rank higher, and our shopping links earn nothing.