Petlibros Luma litter box is a mid-range Litter-Robot dupe people have been waiting for

As a lifelong cat owner, it is with the knowledge of experience that I say the chore I dislike the most is cleaning the litter box.

I've tried to interrogate this to no avail — I don't find it particularly gross or tedious (it takes all of three minutes max if you do it daily). And while I couldn't find answers to my aversion, when Petlibro released its first automatic litter box just a couple of months after I adopted a new kitten, well, it felt something like an answer from the universe.

My kitten, Mouse, graciously took up the task of helping me test out the Petlibro Luma Smart Litter Box, both with and without the AI feature set. After about three and a half months (and at many pounds of growth on Mouse's part), here are my thoughts on the Litter-Robot alternative.

Petlibro Luma Smart Litter Box: Price

At $599.99, the price of the Petlibro Luma is nothing to scoff at, so let's break it down.

First of all, included in the box is one litter mat and litter filter (pre-installed in the Luma), an additional litter filter for non-clumping tofu and mixed litters, 15 waste bags, a removable step, and a carbon filter.

Expensive as it is, it is cheaper than a $749 Litter-Robot 4, the $799 Litter-Robot 5, and the $899 Litter-Robot 5 Pro. It is also the same price as the "affordable" model from the brand, the Litter-Robot Evo. At the same time, it far eclipses the price of the much less space-intensive and open-top PetSafe ScoopFree, which will only run you $119.99 (minus the cost of any tray replacements required for upkeep).

All this to say, the price led me to believe that with this product, Petlibro aims to offer the elevated automatic litter box experience (i.e., the Litter-Robot experience) at a price just competitive enough to be considered cheaper than Litter-Robot's.

In addition to the upfront cost, to perform as intended, this litter box also requires replacement of the carbon air filter ($19.99) every one to three months and the interior litter mat ($29.99) every 90 days. If you want access to features like saved videos and smart summaries that feature details about your cat's health, these are the available pricing tiers:

• Video Cloud AI Standard: Costs $95.99 per year, with support for one Luma device. Saves seven-day video history, with smart summaries and highlight reels.

• Video Cloud AI Premium: Costs $135.99 per year, with support for one Luma device. Saves 30-day video history, with smart summaries and highlight reels.

• Video Cloud AI Premium Family: Costs $159.99 per year, with support for up to three Luma devices. Also saves 30-day video history, with smart summaries and highlight reels.

None of these are required to use the litter box (and I found it functioned more than fine without them), but if one of the primary reasons you're in the automatic litter box market is because you want to closely monitor your pet's health, it's a cost worth noting. For the majority of the testing period, I had access to the AI premium subscription, courtesy of Petlibro.

How the Petlibro Luma litter box works

The available feature set with this litter box includes the following, with bolded features only available with the AI subscription (which I'll get more into below):

• Automatic cleaning with odor control

• AI waste analysis

• Washable base

• Multi-cat detection

• Visit monitoring

• Video cloud storage

• Long-term health analytics

• Safety features

For a basic clean, the central part of the box rotates back and upwards to dump all the waste into the drawer that sits at the bottom of the box. While this happens, an air purifier runs. Then the main part of the litter box rotates back, shifting to reset the litter to an even position comfortable for your cat. All told, it can take about one to two minutes, but the sensors (which I'll talk more about below) will stop the cleaning process if your cat is anywhere near the box.

Maintenance of the box itself is super easy — a notification let me know when it was time to clean out the waste drawer, which, true to Petlibro's estimate, was roughly every two weeks. The central drum of the litter box could easily be popped and cleaned within a matter of five to 10 minutes. While researching for this review, I saw plenty of folks on Reddit complaining about how the spin mechanism of the Litter-Robot made it easy to get dirty, and that cleaning it could be kind of a pain. With the Luma box, the cleaning process felt pretty much as easy as I could imagine.

Seamless performance with even better smell

The first time I emptied the waste drawer after two weeks of use, I was genuinely shocked at how bad it smelled, considering I hadn't noticed it at all prior to opening the drawer. Thankfully, experiencing the smell was short-lived: All I had to do to empty the drawer was tie up the drawstring bag, toss it, and replace it with a new one.

Mouse is an adventurous cat (which tracks for a kitten found on a California freeway), so she was game to use the fancy litter box on day one. Tucked away in my family's living room, everyone I lived with basically forgot it existed after the initial setup, minus the times its cleaning cycle ran. It's not very loud, but if you're worried about it going off at inopportune times, you can schedule cleans or switch on manual mode.

This setup was especially nice for times I wasn't at home for longer stretches. My phone sent notifications every time Mouse was near or using the box, as well as when a cleaning cycle was up. Once I connected it to the AI subscription, I got access to a live and on-demand video feed of Mouse using the box. (Yes, I watched it! It was cute!)

Without the AI features, on the app, I could track every time she used the bathroom, her weight, and even get a picture of her using the box. Of course, it also let me know when the waste drawer needed to be emptied, and when the box needed a replacement carbon filter and litter mat. If she didn't use the bathroom for 24 hours, the app notified me to let me know her habits looked atypical, which could be huge if you're monitoring for any illness or weird behavior from your animal.

The features that live behind a subscription

"What does having an AI litter box even mean?" was a question I was asked no less than five times while I was testing this product, which, valid. I didn't quite know what to expect either.

After my months of testing, I can confidently say it's like having another pair of eyes on your cat — consider the Luma a Bathroom Big Brother. Maybe a bit dystopian, but any cat owner knows cats are notoriously good at hiding any health issues, especially when it relates to their bathroom habits, so in this case, it was genuinely helpful.

With the AI features, you know whether your cat has peed or pooped and whether it looks like a normal version of either. You can also view a video recording directly from the log on the app and verify whether the AI identified everything correctly. Petlibro claims the more you correct the AI, the better it gets, and I found that to line up with my experience.

At the end of a month, Petlibro creates a highlight reel of your cat's time in the bathroom, condensed down to 30-second bits per day. This maybe felt like the least necessary of all the features, but if you're monitoring your cat especially closely and want to make sure you didn't miss a thing, it's a nice fail-safe.

The app also grants you access to care trends, whether that be changes in their waste or frequency of use, or weight, with the data tracked on easy-to-read charts. When revisiting past logs, you could also filter for certain data. Basically, it felt like a period tracker for my cat, which was kind of great for vet appointments.

Safety precautions are there

One of the bigger hesitations I saw online about the Luma litter box was the rollback design of the central part of the litter box. It's fair — during parts of the cleaning process, a cat theoretically inside could get seriously hurt, as the drum rolls all the way back to empty out the waste.

However, Petlibro uses three different sensors to make sure that doesn't happen: an inward-facing AI camera, a weight detection sensor, and a front-facing motion sensor. There's also child-lock features for the buttons on the box itself, and the option to turn off automatic cleaning altogether, or to schedule the cleanings.

Overall, I didn't experience a single problem with safety. Mouse likes to watch when I scoop her non-automated box, and so naturally she also liked to watch the robot box do its thing — any time she got remotely close enough to actually get inside of it, it paused. One time during testing, it actually detected the weight of an animal in the box when there was one, but it was paused until I unplugged and re-plugged in the machine. While that wasn't the most ideal, it did give me the feeling that this box errs on the side of safety over convenience.

Petlibro vs. Litter-Robot

Petlibro's Luma carves itself out as the mid-tier option between budget automatic boxes and the Litter-Robot, so while I haven't had a chance to test the Litter-Robot for myself, it felt worth looking at their feature sets to compare the performance and cost of the two as best I can.

The first difference is that while the Petlibro Luma rolls backward to empty itself, the Litter-Robot spins around from side to side to get empty, which means it always remains open. This has the safety benefit of always giving your cat an option to jump out. However, it does mean it might not appeal to cats who prefer a more open top, which the Luma does provide. As Mouse is still a baby (literally, I mean), she wasn't the best test subject for this point, but Petlibro says its box can fit cats up to 22 pounds.

As I mentioned above, the spinning of the Litter-Robot also led to some folks online complaining about how quickly it can get covered in litter and dust.

Also on the design front, the Petlibro box comes with a ramp that touches the floor, while it's an additional purchase for the Litter-Robot. Compared to the Litter-Robot EVO, the most compact option from the brand, the Luma is a bit shorter but a few inches wider than the Litter-Robot.

Considering the Luma and EVO cost the same price, it's also worth noting that Petlibro claims up to 10 cats can use the Luma, while Litter-Robot doesn't recommend the EVO for more than a one to two-cat household. The EVO also has no WasteID features — you'd have to go to the more expensive Litter-Robot 5 or 5 Pro for that.

Is the Petlibro Luma litter box worth it?

If the idea of a high-end litter box is enticing to you, but the prices of the Litter-Robot have made you hold off until now, the Petlibro Luma presents a worthwhile alternative, especially if you're looking for waste analysis or a box for more than two cats, but don't want to spend upwards of $700.

While I can't personally speak to the performance of the Litter-Robot EVO, value-wise, Petlibro's model is the better option — especially if you can grab it on sale.