Yoto Player vs Toniebox

I just bought a yoto mini player last week, in preparation for my boy's 2nd birthday. I originally set my heart on the toniebox but changed my mind after looking at comparisons. The yoto mini is more portable/durable/customisable (in my opinion) There's comparison videos on YouTube that might be worth looking at to help you decide

We have both options- got them for birthdays in November last year and youngest in March this year My eldest who is 6- we went with yoto box, he is autistic & ADHD and has special interest in things like numbers and the solar system which you can easily get subjects around these with the yoto cards. It also has a clock and can set alarms which have been great for helping him understand what the time is and made morning and evenings much smoother because he can see the time approaching and the alarms give him let him know the next step in routine is approaching more consistently than us trying to verbally do the same. He also quite likes the night light function on it too. Only draw back really has been the full size isn’t as portable as the mini, but I couldn’t tell if the mini had the clock on it or not which was something we wanted…

My second- age 4 has the tonie box- she likes the £8 plastic Disney mini figurines from Sainsburys anyway so figured might as well have figures that actually have some function to them too for not much more money She finds the yoto player easy to operate and she plays with the figures as stand alone toys too… of course she enjoys being able to follow along with the story books as it is being read eg Julia Donaldson books, don’t like that can’t use Bluetooth headphones with it (unless you get a plug in transmitter), again a bit bulky for out and about but as she would collect a bag of toys to take with her anyway we’ve not really had an issue there

I feel like Tonie box is better for younger kids (tonies look like toys while yoto has cards that are occasionally getting destroyed by little ones (not my personal experience since we have a Tonie box, but my friends' daughter broke two yoto cards when she was around 2yo), the box is slightly more intuitive to work with) but yoto grows better with your kids (it has more options for primary school age kids,more educational stuff). Yoto cards are also more affordable than tonies and it's a very important factor.

My youngest- 1 year old has tonie box We only let her use it under supervision (I think the 3+ is potential chocking hazard. So we do watch to make sure she’s not putting any of the parts in her mouth). She has no trouble selecting which one she wants to play and quite enjoys placing them on- have also got her a custom miss Rachel one from Etsy and she loves dancing away to that. Tonie box is very robust- it has a cushioned like covering that protects it from majority of knocks/ bumps that I would have worried would have broken the yoto player. I think overall it feels like the tonie box may be more suited to an overall younger age group and the yoto has more content available for older age groups in addition to the content the to ie box has so would last longer. But I think the yoto box feels like there is a greater potential to be breakable than the tonie box (due to the display screen on it) but that is only speaking for the full size Yoto not the mini

My 1 year old has had a go with her brothers yoto box and it has been quite clear that she couldn’t operate it independently of us at the moment as have to put card into the slot, but if you want it more as a speaker to play music in their room for now you could just stream directly from your phone to it as well… But the does remove some of the opportunity for them to independently choose what they would like to have playing and it has been nice to see her even using the tonie box characters as a way of letting us know what story she would like for bedtime (she pops a few different ones on the tonie box and then when she’s found the one she wants she hands it to us, pointing at the bookcase so we find the book) On both the yoto box and the tonie box you can have create your own recordings- we’ve actually recorded Grandparents and us each reading a different story to them and the kids love this for bedtime (my older two selected which book they wanted each person to read).

We got a yoto mini player to help our 3.5 year old have less screen time. He loved it to start with but now is not so interested in it I have got some blank cards to record some of the songs he likes on them so hopefully this will encourage him more. But if not it's good to have for our little girl to listen to the nursery songs. I like the yoto more than the tonie box as I know the figures would get lost while the yoto cards can be downloaded onto your phone so if you lose them you can just buy a blank card and put lost one onto that. X

We’ve got both and we barely use the yoto box so it’s been a waste tbh and we loose the cards as well. My son absolutely loves the Tonie box and has learnt himself how to take the characters off and put them on and he loves it.

Thanks everyone for your inputs and comparisons. They both seem very similar with only couple differences. We have decided to go Toniebox purely because we still have a gift card for John Lewis so we would only have to pay 90p 🤣 Just really need something without a screen she even tries to watch the Alexa screen when I use that