| Master Page | Page Layout |
It is used to have consistent look and behaviour in your Site.
You can apply branding to the entire site using Master Page. | It is used to create template in your SharePoint site and you can create pages using that template to add content. This way you can manage consistent layout for the pages created using page layout |
| It does not require to activate Publishing feature to use Master Page | It is part of SharePoint publishing feature. So when you use Publishing website (or activate Publishing feature), you can use page layout feature of SharePoint. |
| Master Page does not have content type so it does not store information | Page Layout has content type associated with it so when a page is created using page layout, we can store content in content type’s field |