Salesforce provides two types of web services. Below we are showing the difference between SOAP and REST Web Services which are as follows:

• SOAP web service is a protocol, whereas REST web service is an architectural style in Salesforce.
• SOAP web service stands for Simple Object Access Protocol and REST web service stands for Representational State Transfer.
• SOAP web service is not able to use REST because SOAP is a protocol, whereas REST web service can use SOAP web services because it is a concept and can use any protocol like HTTP, SOAP.
• SOAP web service uses services interfaces to expose the business logic and REST web service uses URI to expose business logic.
• SOAP web service defines standards to be strictly followed, whereas REST web service does not define too many standards like SOAP.
• SOAP web service defines standards to be strictly followed, whereas REST web service does not define too many standards like SOAP.
• SOAP web service requires more bandwidth and resource than REST and REST web service requires less bandwidth and resource than SOAP.
• SOAP web service defines its own security, whereas RESTful web service inherits security measures from the underlying transport.
• SOAP web service permits XML data format only, whereas REST web service permits different data format such as Plain text, HTML, XML, JSON etc.
• SOAP web service is less preferred than REST, whereas REST web service more preferred than SOAP.
• SOAP web service supports several protocols and technologies, including WSDL, WS-Addressing, and XSDs, but REST web service based implementation is simple compared to SOAP.