An emoji is a tiny picture of something. An emoticon is a sequence of characters that represents a facial expression. Thus, an emoji can be basically anything, from facial expressions to food items to sporting goods to national flags. An emoticon, meanwhile, is only a facial expression that conveys an emotion.

Emojis are just like emoticons, but they are available in all kinds of genres such as animals, expressions, places end objects. Whereas emoticons are a set of ad-hoc symbols that are created using alphanumeric characters. Emoji do not use keyboard characters (numbers, punctuation marks, and letters) to be get inserted in messages.

The difference between both the terms is quite simple. While emojis are a vast set of pictorial symbols used to express all sorts of emotions without using words, emoticons are more like a subset of emojis but used to express human emotions.