Buy Minecraft. Roblox is not a game you buy, which is the whole comparison
If you are choosing one thing for a child, a family or a group of friends to play together, buy Minecraft. It is one purchase, there is nothing to spend afterwards, it crossplays across every platform the Bedrock version runs on, and up to four people can share one screen on a console. You know on the day you buy it exactly what it will cost you and exactly what is in it.
Roblox is the better answer for exactly one kind of player: somebody who wants constant novelty and whose friends are already on it. It is not a game. Roblox describes itself as free to use, with a virtual currency called Robux that buys features inside individual experiences and items such as avatar clothing - and the experiences themselves are built by other users in Roblox Studio, the company's free design tool. That means the quality, the tone and the spending pressure vary enormously from one Roblox experience to the next, because they are made by different people. Checked October 11, 2026.
The comparison that actually decides it: what does it cost after you say yes?
Minecraft: nothing. One purchase per platform, no currency, no in-game shop you need to engage with. A Realms subscription exists if you want a server that stays up when you are offline, and it is optional. Our Minecraft write-up covers what the purchase gets you on each platform.
Roblox: open-ended, and that is the honest answer.The platform is free to enter and the costs sit inside the experiences. This is not a hidden trap - Roblox publishes controls for it - but it is a different kind of decision from buying a game. Parents can create an account with parent privileges, link it to the child's account, and set a monthly spending limit covering how much money the child can spend on Roblox including Robux, plus daily screen-time limits. Under-16 accounts need a linked parent account to send or receive Robux at all, approval is required each time, and transfers are capped at up to 500 Robux a day and 1,000 a month.
If you are the sort of person who would rather pay once and stop thinking about it, that paragraph is your answer, and it is Minecraft.
Age handling, side by side
Roblox has moved a long way on this and it deserves credit for it. In 2026 the company introduced age-based account types: users aged five to eight are placed on a Roblox Kids account, move to Roblox Select at nine, and reach a standard account at sixteen, with chat restricted for younger tiers. Roblox also states that conversations are monitored for child endangerment for users aged 13 and over, and its own guidance stresses that moving communications off the platform to other websites or apps violates its policies.
Minecraft's model is simpler rather than more sophisticated: on a private world or a console split-screen session, the only people your child plays with are the people in the room or the people they invited. There is no public lobby to be matched into. That simplicity is the reason we recommend it for younger children even though Roblox's controls are more elaborate - the smallest safe configuration of Minecraft is "one world, four known people", and that is very hard to get wrong. Our kids and online play guide goes through the settings for both situations.
Playing together: crossplay and player counts
Both are strong here and they get there differently. Roblox runs on practically anything with a screen and everyone meets in the same experience regardless of device. Minecraft's Bedrock version crossplays across console, phone and Windows, takes eight or more players online, and additionally supports up to four players on one screen on a console - which Roblox does not do. If your situation is "four people, one sofa, one television", that is not a close call. See Minecraft split-screen for how that works and phone and console crossplay for the mixed-device case.
One genuine Minecraft caveat: the Java Edition sold for PC is a separate program that does not crossplay with consoles or phones and has no split-screen. If anybody in the group is on a console or a phone, buy Bedrock.
