Wood welding is a relatively recent procedure for preparing joints between pieces of wood that shows promising potential for avoiding some of the problems related to conventional adhesive jointing of wood. Tensile testing on selected specimens has indicated capacities of welded wood joints to reach 10 kN. Even though this is lower than the capacity achieved of similar joints with adhesive bonding, wood welding may be useful in specific applications. As a first step towards more extensive characterization of their damage behaviour and of the failure mechanisms, tensile tests on welded wood joints have been monitored with acoustic emission (AE). The AE and mechanical properties are compared to those obtained from adhesively bonded wood-joints made from the same type of wood. First results are presented and discussed in this comparative case study.