An experimental investigation comparing the properties of plasma jets in dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) configuration using a powered electrode with and without a dielectric barrier is reported in this work. Measurements of plasma parameters were performed for both configurations using argon and helium as working gases. As a result, differences were found in discharge power (P plasma ), rotational and vibrational temperatures (T r and T v , respectively) when switching from one configuration to the other. It has been observed that despite the remarkable increase in P plasma when changing from the double barrier configuration to the single barrier one, the values obtained for T r and T v also increased, but not in the same proportion as the increase in P plasma , which suggests a non-linear dependency between temperature and discharge power s in the plasma jet. As a general conclusion, if higher power is really required for some application it is better to use the non-covered tip configuration.