Like Tor, Freenet attempts to provide anonymity by obscuring the ultimate origin of any given request

Unlike Tor, Freenet can't be directly used like a VPN.

Unlike Tor, Freenet nodes don't route to specific origin servers, but also provide storage to the network. Data is "inserted" to announce its presence, and then cached along the path of any requests. This is supposed to both provide robust access to popular data and provide plausible deniability against any given node operator being responsible for the data (the extent to which it succeeds at either aim in practice is a subject of quite some discussion).

Louis Rossmann recently did an interview with Ian Clarke (founder of the freenet project) and it is a pretty good dive into it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoV9amsnaQg

Tor gives you an anonymous connection to some server. Stuff that’s not linked to is still available to the server admin.

Freenet provides an anonymous, encrypted, and distributed cache that does not rely on the security of any one server. Stuff that’s not linked to could just as well not exist, because no one can access it.

In a nutshell: Tor is communication, while Freenet is storage (with some communication as a matter of necessity). Folks like me might quibble about whether Freenet is reliable storage or something more like caching, but the key point is that data exists in Freenet at rest for retrieval later.

In basic terms, Tor is used to browse the Internet, while Freenet is used to browse Freenet. You can browse the Internet without Tor, but you cannot browse Freenet without Freenet.

Freenet is slightly older and doesn’t route internet traffic, just distributed static sites.