Robotic harvesting of kiwifruit can help solve the labour shortage of the growing New Zealand kiwifruit industry. The objective of this thesis was to compare the performance of the improved state-of-the-art selective kiwifruit harvester and a new non-selective harvester in terms of economic viability. The harvesters were tested on commercial kiwifruit orchards. Both kiwifruit harvesters were not economically viable at the current state. The greatest barrier to economic viability was the high breakeven performance requirement of at least 95% success-picked-detached for green fruit and 97% for gold fruit. The high-performance requirement was forced by the high fruit value ratio of 16 for green fruit and 30 for gold fruit. Despite the high harvesting rate potential of a non-selective harvester, fruit handling and stemless detachment were the main barriers. The state-of-the-art kiwifruit harvester had high performance relative to other harvesters but required more development on fruit loss reduction and the robotic configuration for better workload sharing. To achieve economic viability, the primary focus for all kiwifruit harvesters should be on raising the success-detached ratio. The secondary focus should be on improving the performance-to-cost ratio. With further development, the selective harvester could reach economically viable performance.