A Laravel collection is a general-purpose collection of values with fluent methods such as map, filter, groupBy, reduce, and sort. It can contain any kind of data, including arrays, strings, objects, or models.

An Eloquent collection is returned when Eloquent retrieves multiple models. It extends Laravel collection behavior with model-aware methods such as find, load, loadMissing, modelKeys, and toQuery. Use generic collections for ordinary data transformation and Eloquent collections when working with a set of models and their relationships.