Such a good question. They are super similar, and I wouldn’t recommend using both at the same time (though there may be cases where that’s appropriate).
Differences:
- you can pre-create specific labels as an admin, and decide if you want to let users be able to create their own. Tags are all user-created
- users can subscribe to labels but not to tags
- there are different components available for labels vs tags (eg a tag cloud for tags but not for labels? Maybe? I can’t remember :))
- labels are at the node level (eg for a specific board) while tags are global (I think. I’ll confirm when I’m on a real computer and not my phone). So, if you click on a tag you can see all of the content with that tag across the community, whereas with a label it would just be for that board.
- users other than the author of the post can tag a post. Jimmy can tag sue’s post if he wants to (though I doubt this happens a lot?)
I’d say, if you want an admin-created organization method within your boards, use admin-generated labels (which end users can select from).
If you want it more organic / user-generated, use tags, or perhaps user-generated labels (but I wouldn’t mix user-generated and admin-generated labels - super confusing).
Hope this is helpful, and apologies for my slight uncertainty above. I figured a slightly uncertain response via my phone was better than not responding 🙂
cheers!
