Plant vs animal cells: the key differences, with a comparison table

The three main differences between plant and animal cells are that plant cells have a cell wall made mainly of cellulose, chloroplasts for photosynthesis and a large central vacuole, while animal cells have none of these. Both are eukaryotic cells, meaning they keep their DNA inside a nucleus and have membrane-bound organelles (small internal compartments with specific jobs), so they share most of their parts, including mitochondria.

Animal cells, in turn, usually have structures that plant cells lack, such as centrioles and lysosomes. These are textbook rules with real exceptions, and the comparison table below lists both.

Key facts about plant and animal cells

• Cell wall: plant cells have a rigid wall outside the cell membrane, made mostly of cellulose, a chain of glucose molecules. Animal cells have no wall.
• Chloroplasts: found in plant cells that photosynthesize, mostly in the leaf’s middle layer (the mesophyll). Animal cells have none.
• Central vacuole: in a mature plant cell it can take up as much as 90% of the cell’s volume and helps control the cell’s water content.
• Centrioles: most animal cells have a pair inside the centrosome. Cells of flowering plants and conifers have none.
• Shared parts: both cell types have a nucleus, a cell membrane, ribosomes, endoplasmic reticulum, a Golgi apparatus and mitochondria.

What are the 3 main differences between plant and animal cells?

1. Plant cells have a cell wall

The cell wall sits outside the cell membrane and gives a plant cell support and a relatively fixed shape. Its main ingredient is cellulose, whose glucose chains bond to one another to make the wall rigid and strong. Animal cells have only a flexible cell membrane on the outside.

The wall is not unique to plants: some protists also build cellulose walls. It is the difference that shapes many others, from how plant cells divide to how they connect with their neighbours.

2. Plant cells can have chloroplasts

Chloroplasts capture light energy and use it to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar, releasing oxygen. Animal cells cannot photosynthesize, so animals must eat food made by other organisms.

Not every plant cell has chloroplasts. Chloroplast-containing cells are found mostly in the mesophyll of leaves. Plant cells also have other kinds of plastids, a family of related organelles that chloroplasts belong to. And chloroplasts are not limited to plants: photosynthetic protists, including many algae, have them too.

3. Mature plant cells have a large central vacuole

A vacuole is a membrane-bound sac. In a mature plant cell, one large central vacuole can account for about 90% of the cell’s volume. It helps regulate how much water the cell holds and presses outward against the wall, keeping the cell firm. When a plant runs short of water, the vacuole shrinks, the wall loses that support and the plant wilts. The vacuole also lets the cell grow larger without making much new cytoplasm.

The big vacuole develops as plant cells mature; young plant cells do not have one. Animal cells never have a large central vacuole. Textbooks often say they have a few small vacuoles, while some cell biologists prefer to call these small sacs vesicles and say animal cells have no true vacuoles.

Plant and animal cells compared

Sources: OpenStax Biology 2e (sections 3.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.6, 8.1, 10.2 and 30.2); Tan et al. (2019) on plant vacuoles; Lopez et al. (2017) and Renzaglia et al. (2017) on centrioles in plant sperm; Anastasiadi et al. (2024) on red blood cells.

Do plant cells have mitochondria?

Yes. A common mistake is to think chloroplasts replace mitochondria in plants. OpenStax describes mitochondria as the energy factories of both plant and animal cells. Chloroplasts make sugar using light; mitochondria then release usable energy from sugar through cellular respiration. A leaf cell therefore runs both processes.

Where do plant cells get the ingredients for photosynthesis?

Carbon dioxide enters leaves from the air through small, adjustable pores called stomata. Water does not come from the air: a plant absorbs it through its roots and carries it up to the leaves. In words, the overall reaction is six carbon dioxide molecules plus six water molecules, powered by sunlight, producing one sugar molecule and six oxygen molecules.

Those roots and leaves can reach an enormous scale. Our article on the biggest plant in the world shows what walled, photosynthesizing cells can build.

How do plant and animal cells store energy?

Plants store extra glucose as starch, for example in roots and seeds. Humans and other vertebrates store it as glycogen, mainly in liver and muscle cells. Both are long chains of glucose.

When the cell needs fuel, enzymes break these chains back down into glucose. In animals, the breakdown of glycogen is called glycogenolysis. Only after that does cellular respiration take over, using the glucose to make energy available to the cell. Respiration does not break down starch or glycogen directly.

How do plant and animal cells divide differently?

In animal cells, the centrosome and its two centrioles help organize the fibres that pull chromosomes apart. After the chromosomes separate, a contractile ring of actin filaments tightens around the middle of the cell until the membrane is pinched into two cells.

A plant cell cannot be pinched in two because of its wall. Instead, vesicles from the Golgi apparatus gather at the middle of the cell and fuse into a cell plate, which grows into a new wall between the daughter cells. Plant cells also divide successfully without centrioles, showing that centrioles are not essential for cell division in every organism.

How do neighbouring cells connect and communicate?

Because cell walls keep neighbouring plant cells’ membranes apart, plant cells are joined by plasmodesmata, channels that pass through the walls and connect the cytoplasm of adjacent cells. The animal-cell counterpart is the gap junction, a channel built from proteins that lets ions and nutrients pass directly between cells. In heart muscle, gap junctions help cells contract together.

Animal cells also have tight junctions, which seal neighbouring cells together so fluids cannot leak between them, and desmosomes, which act like spot welds in stretchy tissues such as skin. These junctions hold tissues together rather than carry messages.

What the simple rules leave out

• “Only plants have chloroplasts” is false: algae and other photosynthetic protists have them, and many plant cells lack them.
• “All animal cells have centrioles” is false: mature mammalian red blood cells lose their organelles. “No plant cells have centrioles” is also too strong, because some plants make them in sperm-forming cells.
• “Plant cells are rectangular” describes textbook diagrams, not real tissues, where cell shapes vary widely.
• “Plant cells have lysosomes” is a matter of definition: their lytic vacuoles do a lysosome-like job.

For exams, the safest answer to “give three differences” is still the cell wall, chloroplasts and large central vacuole. Knowing the exceptions shows you understand why those differences exist.

Related reading

• How CRISPR edits the DNA inside cells
• What body part heals the fastest, and why
• What is the biggest plant in the world?

Update note: This article was substantially revised on October 12, 2026, to put the three main differences first, add a full comparison table with exceptions, and correct several errors: not all animal cells have centrioles; many plant cells lack chloroplasts and chloroplasts also occur in algae; plant cell shapes vary; plants take in water through their roots, not from the air; starch and glycogen are broken down by enzymes before respiration; and plant lytic vacuoles perform lysosome-like digestion. An incorrect claim that animals make only 10 of 20 amino acids was removed, along with unlabeled images. It was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources listed below.

Sources

• OpenStax, Biology 2e, 4.3 Eukaryotic Cells
• OpenStax, Biology 2e, 4.4 The Endomembrane System and Proteins
• OpenStax, Biology 2e, 4.6 Connections between Cells and Cellular Activities
• OpenStax, Biology 2e, 3.2 Carbohydrates
• OpenStax, Biology 2e, 8.1 Overview of Photosynthesis
• OpenStax, Biology 2e, 10.2 The Cell Cycle
• OpenStax, Biology 2e, 30.2 Stems
• Tan et al. (2019), A Review of Plant Vacuoles: Formation, Located Proteins, and Functions, Plants 8(9):327
• BioNumbers (Harvard Medical School), Percent of a mature plant cell occupied by the central vacuole
• Lopez et al. (2017), Immunogold Localization of Molecular Constituents Associated with Basal Bodies, Flagella, and Extracellular Matrices in Male Gametes of Land Plants, Bio-protocol 7(21):e2599
• Renzaglia et al. (2017), Transmission Electron Microscopy of Centrioles, Basal Bodies and Flagella in Motile Male Gametes of Land Plants, Bio-protocol 7(19):e2448
• Anastasiadi et al. (2024), Exploring unconventional attributes of red blood cells and their potential applications in biomedicine, Protein & Cell