What is difference between lapply and sapply?

lapply is used to show the output in the form of list whereas sapply is used to show the output in the form of vector or data frame.

lapply returns a list of the same length as X , each element of which is the result of applying FUN to the corresponding element of X . sapply is a user-friendly version and wrapper of lapply by default returning a vector, matrix or, if simplify = “array” , an array if appropriate, by applying simplify2array() .
It is useful for operations on list objects and returns a list object of same length of original set. Sapply function in R does the same job as lapply() function but returns a vector. … Sapply in R is more efficient than lapply() in the output returned because sapply() store values direclty into a vector.

Function Arguments Objective Input Output
apply apply(x, MARGIN, FUN) Apply a function to the rows or columns or both Data frame or matrix vector, list, array
lapply lapply(X, FUN) Apply a function to all the elements of the input List, vector or data frame list
sapply sapply(X, FUN) Apply a function to all the elements of the input List, vector or data frame vector or matrix

In the apply family the difference mostly lies in the output return.

The lapply() stands for the list and applies functions to a the elements of the input and the output is mostly a list which is used for objects like dataframes and lists.

sapply () applies a function to all the elements of the input and returns a vector or matrix as output.