Octonauts and Wild Kratts look alike but suit different kids

Octonauts and Wild Kratts both send a crew out to help an animal in trouble, so from the outside they look like the same kind of show. Underneath, they split on nearly everything a parent cares about: the age each one suits, how quickly it moves, what its tense moments look like and what it spends its time teaching. By the end, you’ll know which one belongs in your child’s week.

Octonauts suits younger children than Wild Kratts does

Octonauts works for a child from about three, and Wild Kratts comes into its own once a child is six. If your child is three, four or five, start with Octonauts; at six, seven and eight both shows work, and the choice comes down to what each one puts on screen.

Wild Kratts is quicker and busier than Octonauts

Wild Kratts runs on action scenes and rapid cuts, and the Wild Kratts episode Creature Power Challenge goes from one action scene straight into the next. Octonauts keeps an even pace and tells one story every time, usually a sea creature in trouble and a crew working out how to help it, so one Octonauts episode is a fair guide to the next. Wild Kratts is harder to predict, since some Wild Kratts videos are single episodes that tell one story and others are compilations that string short scenes together. Neither show is louder than the other; what you’ll notice in the room is the speed.

Creature Power Challenge, a Wild Kratts episode set on the savanna.

Octonauts’ tense moments are rescues, and Wild Kratts adds villains

In Octonauts, the tense moments come from an animal in danger that the crew steps in to save. In the Octonauts episode The Baby Dolphin, a shark closes in on a lost calf until Kwazii leads the shark away, and in the episode The Hermit Crab a shark swims up close to the screen for a moment. Wild Kratts has those moments too, with chases and cartoon villains on top: in Creature Power Challenge the brothers’ creature suits glitch, baby crocodiles chase them underwater and vultures peck at them, all played for laughs. The Wild Kratts villains also bring traps and fights, and now and then one of them calls somebody names, while nobody in Octonauts fights or trades insults.

Wild Kratts teaches about animals, and Octonauts teaches about helping them

Wild Kratts puts its teaching into the animals themselves: how an elephant’s trunk and a rhino’s horn suit the places they live, what a panda’s unusual wrist bone is for, how a sloth bear sucks up termites and how a basilisk lizard runs on water. Octonauts explains real animal facts too, such as hermit crabs moving into empty shells as they grow, but what Octonauts keeps coming back to is the crew helping. In the Octonauts episode The Baby Dolphin, the crew helps a lost calf back to its mother, and Kwazii keeps it safe from a shark.

The hermit crab from the Octonauts episode The Hermit Crab.