Supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO₂) fracturing is a non-aqueous fracturing technology, which has attracted considerable attention on exploiting shale gas. In this study, shale specimens and artificial sandstone specimens were used to conduct SC-CO₂ fracturing and water fracturing experiments to investigate the characteristics of SC-CO₂ induced fractures. An acoustic emission (AE) monitoring device was employed to monitor the AE energy release rate during the experiment. The experiment results indicate that the breakdown pressure of SC-CO₂ fracturing is lower than that of water fracturing under the same conditions, and the AE energy release rate of SC-CO₂ fracturing is 1–2 orders of magnitude higher than that of water fracturing. In artificial sandstone, which is homogeneous, the main fracture mainly propagates along the directions perpendicular to the minimum principal stress, no matter if using SC-CO₂ or water as the fracturing fluid, but in shale with weak structural planes, the propagation direction of the fracture is controlled by the combined effect of a weak structural plane and in-situ stress.