Soap

• SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.
• SOAP is a protocol.
• SOAP uses HTTP and SMTP transport protocol.
• SOAP supports only XML format.
• Using HTTP, SOAP model can tunnel to across firewalls and proxies without any modification to the SOAP protocol.
• SOAP is more secure as compare to REST because it uses own security model.
• SOAP supports WS-Security and ACID transactions.
• Sending message using XML is costly in terms of actual data being sent.

REST

• REST stands for Representational State Transfer.
• Rest is an architectural style.
• REST uses HTTP transport protocol.
• REST support Text, JSON, XML formats.
• REST is completely stateless means it treat each web request independently.
• Rest does not store information of the previous request.
• Restful services provide a good caching mechanism over HTTP GET method. This can improve the perfoŕmance if the data does not change frequently.
• REST uses uniform interface to interact with all the components.
• REST inherit security from underlying transport (Http, Https).
• Sending message using JSON is cheaper in terms of actual data being sent.