By now, you may have observed that cookies and local storage serve almost completely different purposes. The only thing they have in common is that they store data. The following is a brief comparison of cookies and local storage:
| Cookies | Local storage |
| Cookies are transferred to a server on every request automatically by the browser | To transfer local storage data to a server, you need to manually send an Ajax request or send it through hidden form fields |
| If data needs to be accessed and read both by the client and server, use cookies | If the data needs to be accessed and read only by the client, use local storage |
| Cookies can have an expiration date, after which they are automatically deleted | Local storage ... |
