What is the difference between Vagrant and Packer?

The difference between Vagrant and Packer lies in their specific use cases and goals within infrastructure management. Vagrant is a tool used to create and maintain predictable development environments, usually on a developer’s personal computer. It automatically creates and configures virtualized environments, typically by using providers like VirtualBox, Docker, or VMware, which allows easy reproduction across different members of the team.
Packer is designed to build machine images in a platform-agnostic way, including but not limited to AWS, Azure, and VirtualBox. Packer automates the creation of such images and is used ideally to create consistent, preconfigured, reusable environments that can be deployed with consistency to production.
Vagrant manages development environments, and Packer builds machine images for dependable deployments to diverse platforms.