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Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation has many applications in localization and interference mitigation. The estimation performance can be improved by increasing the number of antennas at the receiving array or by using different antenna array configurations. Sparse arrays such as coprime arrays were proposed assuming isotropic antennas, which have unit gain and fixed phase in all directions. In practice, antennas have gain and phase which are functions of the DOA. In this paper, we experimentally examine the impact of antenna directionality on the performance of DOA estimation using directional fabricated sparse arrays of monopole and patch elements based on a software defined radio (SDR) platform. Under equal aperture size and using fewer antenna elements, sparse array DOA estimation performance matches the performance of uniform arrays.