What is the main difference between a broken foot and a sprained foot?

Big difference: Sprains are stretching or tearing of tissues holding bones together, while fractures or breaks are actually failures of the bone itself. Sometime you can have one or the other or both in the same injury.

Broken vs Sprain: The major difference is that that in a fracture a bone is actually broken into two or more fragments, while a sprain involves that straining of the soft tissues of an area.

Fracture: Sprain is a painful injury that does not involve a fracture. Broken foot involves compromise of integrity and alignment of bone(s). -h-.

Bone vs ligament: "broken" usually refers to the presence of a fracture or crack in a bone while "sprained" refers to an injury to the ligaments that hold bones together. There are 27 bones in the foot available to be "broken" and 27+ ligaments that can be "sprained".

Fx vs sprain: Fractures and sprains are very different conditions fractures involve the bones and sprains involve the soft tissue such as ligaments each are unique.