I work as a consultant, and at least for my work it is like this:

Consultants are brought in to "consult", ie they have knowledge and expertise that the client does not have and that the client needs access to. For example, many of my clients have aging skillsets and development practices, and need to rapidly retool their team and organization.

I don't often hear the term freelancer used, but I often hear "contractor". A contractor is brought on to augment the client's existing staff and/or create a specific deliverable. For example, contracting a web designer to implement the desired look and feel of a web page.

Basically, contractors are a lot like employees with higher hourly rates and temporary employment. Consultants are brought in to help a client change their business.

Consultants work on objectives, contractors work on specifications or requirements, is how I like to think about it.

'Solve this problem' vs 'Take these actions and produce this deliverable'.

In my book, different but overlapping terms. A consultant can be a freelancer or can work for either a consulting firm or a product company that has a consulting arm. In IT, "consultant" tends to suggest on-site work though that certainly doesn't have to be the case. And a freelancer can include consultants and programmers but also includes, for example, many writers.

Similar and overlapping as others have said.

But I often liken "consulting" to mean the product you are selling is yourself. Where as "freelance" means the product you are selling is some output (app, website, code, etc.).

It's a lot harder to grow a consulting business beyond 30 to 40 hours a week because a human can only sell so much of his time. But if the value you are providing is an output, you can scale by hiring others to help offload your work. Much more difficult when you have sold yourself as a consultant and the client is expecting YOU.

> It's a lot harder to grow a consulting business beyond 30 to 40 hours a week because a human can only sell so much of his time.

Good consultants sells access to their knowledge, not their time. A consultant who's selling their time is not going to go far, for two reasons:

1 - You can't sell more time than you have (as you mentioned).

2 - Selling time means billing time (hourly or daily). That means the cost of your services will be compared against other hourly work, like design, data entry, and legal services. That comparison never works out in your favor.

That's a good goal and when I worked as an IT industry analyst we tried very hard to steer clients away from time-based engagements/deliverables. That said, if the engagement is something like "meet with our team for a day and give us feedback on XYZ initiative" it's hard not to have some linkage between hours and deliverable. (Though we would also throw in reports/follow-up/etc. to blur the linkage to some degree.) Ditto for giving a presentation. Funnily enough though, these types of engagements were actually the ones that brought in the most money per hour spent because they involved high value in-person interactions rather than just creating a written document.

EDIT: And sometimes, billing has to be done per hour for various reasons. The time I worked on an expert witness report, we had to bill per hour because that's how the lawyers worked. (Which was fine given that the pay was good and it would have been very hard for us to estimate the time in advance.)

This is great! I've always equated consulting with freelancing, in the sense that say if you were consulting as a data scientist, you actually do the model building for the client, but this changes everything!

If regular people are selling their data.

Or programmers are selling information.

And consultants sell knowledge.

Who sells wisdom? ;)

The terms are somewhat interchangeable to me, and you can refer to yourself either way if you are doing contract work. But I think freelance has a more individual aspect to it - you are working as a solo person (ie Joe Smith). When you start calling yourself a consultant, you might be working under a business name ("ABC Corp" for example) even if it's still just a one-person company. That might also involve how you invoice your clients as well.

Of course these are just my own impressions, there's no firm rules as far as I know for calling yourself one vs the other.

I've always considered consultants to be more on-site, but maybe that's because I didn't hear of freelancing much before the Internet and remote working.

There were plenty of freelancers before remote working and the Internet - in many fields other than software. They were probably just not that visible to the average person - precisely due to lack of Internet and later social media.