Originally Posted by Wikipedia
The Digimon franchise has been criticized as being a clone of the more popular Pokémon title, as both properties are aimed at children and feature interaction between humans and imaginary monsters. Although their basic concepts are similar, their respective media thematically bear little in common. Some Digimon video games also center on sportsmanship, but in the anime, Digimon fight to survive or to destroy enemies, as opposed to Pokémon battles where the Pokémon faints instead of dying. In addition, once a Pokémon evolves it has no way to go back to its original state, while the DigiDestined's Digimon can.
In addition to this, Digimon were created to be more "human" characters, and the animators thus gave them human emotions and speech (being able to talk like humans), as well as an ability to emotionally 'connect' to their human partners. But they are also wild creatures, therefore they combine human and animal aspects. Pokémon animators gave their Monsters non-human characters, animal-like qualities and features.
