Tommee Tippee vs Dr. Brown's: which bottle should you buy?

Side by side

Two rows carry this page. The first is price against engineering: a valve in the nipple sold in cheap multi-packs, against a vent tube that works better and costs you two extra parts at every wash. The second is the row almost nobody writes about — what happens on a hard suck, where a soft wide nipple can collapse flat and a vented bottle will not.

The venting: both claim it, one engineers it

Tommee Tippee's Natural Start bottle has a vent valve built into the nipple, which the maker says reduces air intake and helps reduce symptoms of colic. That is the same basic approach most mainstream bottles take: a hole or slit that lets air into the bottle so the baby is not drinking against a vacuum.

Dr. Brown's does something more involved. Its internal vent tube routes incoming air past the milk to the back of the bottle, so the milk itself is not aerated and no vacuum builds against the nipple as the bottle empties. It is the most thoroughly documented venting design on the US shelf, and it is the reason Dr. Brown's has the reputation it does with gassy babies.

Two honest qualifications, and they apply to both bottles. "Less air in the milk" is a plumbing claim, not a cure: a baby who cries inconsolably every evening is not necessarily a baby with a bottle problem. And no vent helps a baby who is gulping because the flow rate is wrong for them — that is a nipple problem, and it is the first thing to check. We cover it in bottle nipple flow sizes, explained.

Nipple collapse: the specific thing that goes wrong

This is the failure mode that sends people from Tommee Tippee to Dr. Brown's, and it is worth naming because it looks like a defect and is not one. The Natural Start nipple is a soft, wide, thin silicone dome. A baby with a strong suck, or a baby working at a slow flow level, can pull it inward until it folds flat. The feed stops, the baby gets angry, and you have to break the seal with a finger to let air back in.

It is more common on a nearly-empty bottle and on the slowest flow. The usual fixes are to loosen the collar very slightly, to move up one flow level, or to stop over-tightening the cap. If none of those settle it, the architecture is the problem, and Dr. Brown's vent is the architecture that solves it: with air routed in through the tube, there is far less for the nipple to fight.

Parts to wash: the daily cost of the better vent

Three parts against five, six to eight times a day. Over a week that is roughly sixty small items in the drying rack against roughly a hundred, and the Dr. Brown's vent tube and reservoir need a brush rather than a rinse. A vent assembled slightly wrong is also the single most common cause of the leaks Dr. Brown's gets blamed for, usually from over-tightening or over-filling.

If you have a dishwasher with a heated dry or sanitize cycle, the gap narrows a lot. If you are hand-washing in a small kitchen at midnight, it is the deciding factor for a lot of people — and it is the reason we rate Tommee Tippee's three-part simplicity as a real advantage rather than a compromise. The routine that makes a five-part bottle survivable is in how to wash baby bottles, and the drying half of it is in how to dry baby bottles.

The underrated detail: Dr. Brown's says the vent can be removed as feeding develops, with no need to change bottle. So you can run five parts while the baby is windy and drop to three when they are not, without buying a second set. Nothing in the Tommee Tippee range does the reverse.

Shape, and where the bottle has to fit

The Natural Start bottle is short and squat with a wide neck. That makes it genuinely easy to hold one-handed and easy to get a brush into, and it is a shape a breastfed baby often takes more readily. It is also the shape least likely to fit a bottle-warmer well or a narrow sterilizer rack. Dr. Brown's narrow bottles are the opposite: slimmer, taller, and they drop into essentially every warmer made.

Worth checking before you buy either: what else is already on your counter. If you own a warmer, measure the well. If you are still deciding, our bottle warmer picks note bottle fit on every entry, and do you need a bottle warmer? argues that plenty of families do not.

Flow range, and why it matters at the slow end

Tommee Tippee sells Natural Start bottles with a slow-flow nipple from newborn, in 5oz, 9oz and 11oz bodies. Dr. Brown's publishes a longer ladder at the bottom end, including Preemie and Ultra-Preemie flows below the standard newborn level.

For most full-term babies this never comes up. For a baby born early, a baby with a weak suck, or a baby who chokes and sputters on anything faster, it is the whole decision — there is simply more range available below newborn in the Dr. Brown's range. That is the argument we make at length in best bottles for preemies, and the nipple-first version of it is in the best bottle nipples.

If you are mixing breast and bottle

Lean Tommee Tippee for the first attempt. A wide, soft, gently sloping nipple is the easier shape for a breastfed baby to transfer onto, and the cheap multi-pack means a refusal costs you very little. Tommee Tippee markets the shape as breast-like and claims high acceptance; we cannot verify an acceptance rate, and we would not buy six bottles on the strength of a marketing figure — but buying two to find out is sensible, which is exactly what how many bottles do I need? recommends.

If the baby takes it and then fights the feed, the problem is more likely pace than shape. Learn paced bottle feeding before you buy a different brand; it costs nothing and fixes more feeds than a purchase will. And if the bottle is refused outright, work through why won't my baby take a bottle?

The third option: Dr. Brown's with a wide neck

If you want Dr. Brown's venting but your baby has already settled on a wide nipple, the Anti-Colic Options+ wide-neck version is the obvious answer. Same internal vent, same remove-it-later behavior, in a bottle shape much closer to the Tommee Tippee.

The trade is the same one the Tommee Tippee makes: a wide neck is easier to brush out, and it will not fit a narrow warmer well, and it takes more cupboard space. If neither shape is settled yet, buying one narrow and one wide and letting the baby decide is a legitimate and cheap experiment.

Which one to buy

Buy Tommee Tippee Natural Start if you are buying a first bottle and nothing has gone wrong yet. Three parts, a wide soft nipple, a shape that is easy to hold and easy to clean, and a multi-pack price that makes the whole experiment low-risk. This is the cheapest honest way into bottle feeding.

Buy Dr. Brown's Anti-Colic Options+ Narrow if gas is already your problem, if the Tommee Tippee nipple keeps collapsing, if your baby needs a flow slower than newborn, or if your bottles have to fit a narrow warmer. You are accepting two extra parts per wash for the best-engineered venting here, and you can take the vent out later.

Buy Dr. Brown's Anti-Colic Options+ Wide-Neck if you want that vent but the baby has already refused a narrow nipple.

Neither of these is expensive relative to a year of feeding, so price should not be the whole decision — but it is a fair tiebreaker when you genuinely do not know yet which your baby prefers. For the two ranges placed against the rest of the field, that is the best baby bottles, and if gas is your actual problem rather than your suspected one, start at the best anti-colic bottles.

How we chose

Researched, not hands-on, and we say so on every card. The venting designs, parts counts, bottle sizes, materials and the remove-the-vent claim come from the makers' own specification pages — Tommee Tippee and Dr. Brown's, with the slow-end flow range from Dr. Brown's preemie nipple specification. Independent hands-on testing of the wider bottle field comes from Mommyhood101. Cleaning requirements are the CDC's and the spit-up context is the AAP's. On this page daily cleaning load and the cost of being wrong are weighted heaviest, because a first-time buyer cannot predict which nipple their baby will accept. Full rubric: how we choose.