Litter-Robot 5: what Whisker will and will not tell you

Whisker’s Litter-Robot 5 is $799 against $699 for the 4, and working out what the extra hundred dollars buys is unusually easy — because almost everything the 5 adds is something Whisker has decided to put a number on.

What it publishes

• Up to 5 cats. This is the interesting one. No other automatic litter box we cover carries a published cat-count rating at all, including the Litter-Robot 4.
• 3–30 lb cat weight range, up from 3–25 lb on the 4.
• 28.7 lb empty against 24 lb, and 29.9 in tall against 29.5.
• Same 15.75 in square entryway and the same 22 x 27 in footprint.
• WasteID recognition and an LCD display.

What it still does not publish

The waste drawer capacity. In a multi-cat house that is the number that determines how often somebody has to deal with it, and Whisker describes the 5’s drawer only as having “improved waste drawer distribution and size” relative to the 4 — whose capacity is also unpublished. Improved relative to an unknown is not information.

Neakasa publishes 11.23 L for the M1’s waste bin. Casa Leo publishes 1.5 gallons for Leo’s Loo Too. Both are smaller companies than Whisker and both manage it.

The verdict

For one or two average-sized cats, the 5 is $100 of headroom you will never reach and the 4 is the sensible buy. For three or more cats, or any cat over 25 lb, the published rating is worth paying for — not because we have verified it, but because it is a claim Whisker can be held to and the 4’s silence is not.

Either way, budget for the consumables. Drawer liners and carbon filters run to about $228 a year with three cats at Whisker’s own listed prices, identically on both units. The full comparison is in Litter-Robot 4 vs 5, and the cost arithmetic is in automatic litter box running costs.

The wider point about this category

Whisker is the biggest name in automatic litter boxes and it publishes less usable capacity data than two much smaller competitors. Neakasa states 7.17 L of litter and 11.23 L of waste. Casa Leo states 1.5 gallons of each. Whisker states neither, for either unit, at any price point.

That is not a small omission. In a household with three or four cats, how often somebody has to deal with the drawer is the entire experience of owning one of these machines, and it is knowable only from a capacity figure. Every other spec — the app, the display, the waste recognition — is downstream of it.

• What the 5 gives you that is checkable: a five-cat rating, a 30 lb weight ceiling, 28.7 lb of unit.
• What it gives you that is not: a “slightly larger globe” and an “improved” drawer, both relative to an unpublished baseline.

We would rather pay $100 for a number we can hold a manufacturer to than for an adjective, which is most of why the 5 is the pick for a bigger household and the 4 is the pick for a smaller one.