In the world of software development, the myriad of terminologies could be a serious challenge to get your head around especially for beginners but the concept of  Frameworks and Libraries is still confusing even to many experienced developers. So, unsurprisingly, both terms are sometimes used interchangeably due to their similarities but they are still very different. If ( just like me a while ago) you have been wondering about the differences between these terminologies then stay tuned as this article is intended to clarify things.
 

The Differences

The differences between a library and framework lie in their definitions and to understand this we have to first look at the meaning of a library.
 
Library
A library is a collection of custom and pre-written functions and methods which are intended to speed up your software development process as instead of writing your functions from scratch you can just call a custom function provided by the library. This translates to fewer lines of code required to be written by you. A library usually offers you more freedom as it is usually designed to provide a specific function. A very popular example is Reactjs used for front-end web development.
 
Framework
A framework, on the other hand, is also a collection of custom functions that helps to speed up the development process but the main difference is that it is usually larger than a standalone library because it is a collection of smaller libraries. A framework basically offers you an already made frame or structure (a skeleton ) and all you have to do is to populate it with your own code and functions. This means that a framework enforces its own development style, patterns and ways of doing things generally. An example is Angular.
 
The differences are tabulated below
Differences

 
Conclusion
In this article, we have looked at the meaning of a library and framework and also tried to highlight the differences between both of them. I hope this helps someone out there to finally learn the differences between both of them.