It doesn’t take as long as cycling with fish, but it can be frustrating to buy everything you need for a tank and then leave it empty for over a month. You can buy a bacteria starter to speed up the process, but your local tap water already contains some of that needed bacteria, which will multiply around an ammonia source. In the second method, also known as fishless cycling, you add a small dose of concentrated ammonia once the tank is set up but before the fish are in, and let the tank take care of the rest. It’ll take around eight weeks and require frequent water changes to ensure your fish don’t die, but this way you can add those two or three fish immediately. In the first method, you use two or three hearty fish and allow bacteria to multiply to handle their waste. You have two different ways to cycle your aquarium. Buying our individual picks for tanks, filters, heaters, and lights will cost between $30 and $70 more than going with a kit, but you'll end up with a more powerful and versatile filter, an adjustable heater, and a significantly brighter, customizable light, which is important if you plan to grow live plants. While either the Marina or Aqueon starter kit will give you a good basic setup for a great price, you can get significantly better equipment by buying components individually, which will likely improve the conditions for your fish.

We have recommendations for all of those components (except the fish), and you can buy most of them online, though you should plan a trip to your friendly local fish store for the fish and for advice on the best way to set up your tank.

But you'll also need substrate, water conditioner, a water test kit, a gravel vacuum, food, an algae sponge, and fish. It's the second-best tank kit we found after the Marina offering.Īn aquarium kit comes with a tank, a light, a filter, and (usually) a heater. But it’s available at a great price for a kit that contains all the basics for a tropical tank, from a company with reliable customer service and a huge range of compatible accessories that are available at most fish shops.

Its preset heater isn't as good as our adjustable stand-alone recommendation, either. Compared with the Marina kit, it has a dimmer light and a less powerful filter, though both are still decent. If our main pick sells out, or if you want a kit that includes a heater, the 20-gallon Aqueon LED 20 Aquarium Kit is a good alternative.

Super modern fish tanks