We study three-body entanglement induced by spontaneous emission in a three two-level atoms system by using the entanglement tensor approach. The results show that the amount of entanglement is strongly dependent on the initial state of the system and the species of atoms. The three-body entanglement is the result of the coherent superposition of the two-body entanglements. The larger the two-body entanglement is, the stronger the three-body entanglement is. On the other hand, if there exists a great difference in three two-body entanglement measures, the three-body entanglement is very weak. We also find that the maximum of the two-body entanglement obtained with nonidentical atoms is greater than that obtained with identical atoms via adjusting the difference in atomic frequency.