Buyer guide 7 orderable
Best humanoid robot under $1,000
The entry level is real now. None of these will do your chores, all of them walk, talk or see, and none of them costs more than a phone.
7 machines qualify7 you can orderPrices checked 2026-09-04No commission
The answer
Z-Bot
$999 for an open-source developer robot from a company that publishes everything. It is small and it is early, and it is one of the only Western options at any price under $3,000.
- Buy it if
- Developers who want to hack on open hardware without importing anything.
- Skip it if
- You need a finished product.
In its favour
- $999 and open source
- United States based
- Full transparency on design
Against it
- Early-stage company
- Preorder queues
- Desk-scale capability
- Height
- not published
- Weight
- not published
- Joints
- not published
- Autonomy
- Partly teleoperated
- Availability
- preorder, preorder
$999Maker’s own store
59/100
Solid
Provisional, specs incomplete
Capability 10/30
Value 21/25
Buyability 19/20
Ecosystem 9/15
Proof 0/10
Computed from the data · how the score works
Runners up
The next best.
The full ranking
Everything that qualifies.
01 Z-BotK-Scale Labs · US $999List price preorder 59 02 Hiwonder TonyPi ProHiwonder · CN $789List price in stock 56 03 Robosen K1 ProRobosen Robotics · CN $299Street price in stock 50 04 Reachy MiniPollen Robotics · FR · 28 cm $299 to $449List price preorder 41 05 UBTech Alpha seriesUBTech Robotics · CN · 40 cm $499Street price in stock 41 06 Hiwonder TonybotHiwonder · CN $459Street price in stock 39 07 ROBOTIS MINIRobotis · KR · 27 cm $539Street price in stock 38
We take no commission and no maker pays to be here. How we score · All robots