If you started with a Yoto Player or a Toniebox, you made a great choice for the toddler years. Both are beautifully made, genuinely screen-free, and perfect for small hands. A familiar moment arrives for a lot of families, though. Your kids get older, the card collection has cost a small fortune, and you find yourself wishing for a bigger library without buying a new card every week.
Here is an honest look at where to go next.
What Yoto and Tonies do well
- Screen-free by design. No glowing rectangle, just audio.
- Tactile and kid-proof. Cards and figurines are easy for young children to use on their own.
- Lovely curation for the early years.
If those are your top priorities and your kids are little, they are hard to beat.
Where families start looking for more
- The cost adds up. The players are pay-per-card or pay-per-figurine. A real library can run into hundreds of dollars.
- Listening only. Neither shows the printed words, so they do not support the read-along stage when kids are learning to read.
- Catalog ceilings. Selection skews young, and older kids outgrow it.
"But I want screen-free"
This is the big one, so it is worth being clear. A lot of parents choose Yoto or Tonies because they want screen-free listening, and they assume a streaming app cannot offer that. Sherwood can.
You can use Sherwood completely screen-free. Pair it to the Sherwood Bluetooth speaker, or any Bluetooth speaker you already own, and the stories play with no screen in sight. You can also dedicate an old phone or tablet to it and tuck it out of reach. Your kids do not need to look at anything to enjoy the story.
The difference is that Sherwood gives you both. When you want screen-free, you have it. When a screen is genuinely useful, you also get a thoughtful one built with screen-conscious parents in mind. You can cast a story to the TV, play it through the car speakers, or download it to a tablet so a child can read along with the words. As founders, we do not let our own kids use screens often, and we are still glad to hand them Sherwood, because the time they spend is building reading and comprehension.
The streaming-library alternative
Instead of buying content piece by piece, a streaming subscription gives you the whole library for one price. Sherwood was built for this stage. More than 5,000 audiobooks and ebooks, unlimited, with word-by-word read-along on every title, so it grows with your child from listening into reading.
A few practical differences:
- One price, every book. No per-card purchases.
- One plan, every kid. Up to six child profiles.
- Listening and reading. Read-along supports the learning-to-read years that Yoto and Tonies do not.
- Screen-free or on a screen, your call. A Bluetooth speaker for screen-free, or cast and read-along for when a screen helps.
How to decide
- Toddler who loves a physical toy? Keep the Toniebox or Yoto.
- Growing kids, a library that is getting expensive, and a child learning to read? A streaming library like Sherwood will stretch much further, and it still does screen-free when you want it.
Plenty of families keep the player for the little ones and add streaming for the older kids. There is no wrong answer, just the right fit for the stage you are in.
Sherwood is unlimited audiobooks and ebooks with read-along, and it works screen-free or on screen. Try it free for 60 minutes, no card required.