What is the difference between CSRF tokens and API tokens in Laravel?

Question

What is the difference between using CSRF tokens and API tokens? Which one is better? How is the performance? How safe is it?

I want to integrate in Laravel 10 and nuxt.js 3.

I have seen in some videos that people only use CSRF tokens and I want to know the real difference.

Answer 1

CSRF tokens are used to prevent cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. It is a randomly generated token that is stored in the user's session and sent to the application with every request. The application verifies that the token in the request matches the token stored in the session to ensure that the request was made by an authenticated user.

API token is used to authenticate requests to the API. It is a unique identifier generated for each user that can be used to access protected resources on the API. API tokens are typically stored in a secure location, such as a database or file system.

To summarize, CSRF tokens are used to prevent attacks on web applications, while API tokens are used to authenticate requests to APIs.