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There's no real significant difference that should consume too much of your time. There might be some fancy language that some people might take up a lot of spaces to write about, but at the end of the day, as far as a coder, developer, programmer, architect, is concerned, an instance of a class and an object mean the same thing and can often be used interchangeably. I have never met anyone in my career that would be picky and spend half hour trying to point out the differences, because there's really none. Time can be better spent on other development efforts.

UPDATE With regards to Swift, this is what Apple who invented Swift prefers :

An instance of a class is traditionally known as an object. However,
Swift classes and structures are much closer in functionality than in
other languages, and much of this chapter describes functionality that
can apply to instances of either a class or a structure type. Because
of this, the more general term instance is used.

Excellent question.

I'll explain it in the simplest way possible:
Say you have 5 apples in your basket. Each of those apples is an object of type Apple, which has some characteristics (i.e. big, round, grows on trees).

In programming terms, you can have a class called Apple, which has variables size:big, shape:round, habitat:grows on trees. To have 5 apples in your basket, you need to instantiate 5 apples. Apple apple1, Apple apple2, Apple apple3 etc....

Alternatively: Objects are the definitions of something, instances are the physical things.

Does this make sense?

Instance: instance means just creating a reference(copy).

object: means when memory location is associated with the object (is a run-time entity of the class) by using the new operator.

In simple words, Instance refers to the copy of the object at a particular time whereas object refers to the memory address of the class.

Let's say you're building some chairs.

The diagram that shows how to build a chair and put it together corresponds to a software class.

Let's say you build five chairs according to the pattern in that diagram. Likewise, you could construct five software objects according to the pattern in a class.

Each chair has a unique number burned into the bottom of the seat to identify each specific chair. Chair 3 is one instance of a chair object. Likewise, memory location 3 can contain one instance of a software object.

So, an instance (chair 3) is a single unique, specific representation of an object (a chair).

Object:

It is a generice term basically it is a Software bundle that has state(variables) and behaviour(methods)

Class:

A blue print(template) for an object
instance-it's a unique object thing for example you create a object two times what does that mean is yo have created two instances

Let me give an example

Class student()

{

   private string firstName;

  public student(string fname)

  {

    firstName=fname;

  }

  Public string GetFirstName()

  {

    return firstName;

  }

}

Object example:

Student s1=new student("Martin");
Student s2=new student("Kumar");

The s1,s2 are having object of class Student

Instance:

s1 and s2 are instances of object student
the two are unique.

it can be called as reference also.

basically the s1 and s2 are variables that are assigned an object

Objects and instances are mostly same; but having very small difference.
If "car" is a class; 3 cars are 3 different objects. All these objects are instances. So these 3 cars are objects frominstances of "car" class.

But the word "instance" can be "structure instances" also. But object is only for classes.

All the objects are instances.
All the instances may not be objects. Instances may be "structure instances" or "objects".

An object is a construct, something static that has certain features and traits, such as properties and methods, it can be anything (a string, a usercontrol, etc)

An instance is a unique copy of that object that you can use and do things with.

Imagine a product like a computer.

THE xw6400 workstation is an object

YOUR xw6400 workstation, (or YOUR WIFE's xw6400 workstation) is an instance of the xw6400 workstation object

An instance is a specific representation of an object. An object is a generic thing while an instance is a single object that has been created in memory. Usually an instance will have values assigned to it's properties that differentiates it from other instances of the type of object.

Object - An instance of a class that has its own state and access to all of the behaviour defined by its class.

Instance - Reference to an memory area for that particular class.

each object said to be an instance of its class but each instance of the class has its own value for each attributes
intances shares the attribute name and operation with their intances of class but an object contains an implicit reference to his on class

If we see the Definition of Object and Instance object -

Memory allocated for the member of class at run time is called object or object is the instance of Class.

Let us see the Definition of instance -

Memory allocated For Any at run time is called as instance variable.

Now understand the meaning of any run time memory allocation happen in C also through Malloc, Calloc, Realloc such:

struct p

{



}

p *t1

t1=(p) malloc(sizeof(p))

So here also we are allocating run time memory allocation but here we call as instance so t1 is instance here we can not say t1 as object so Every object is the instance of Class but every Instance is not Object.

An object can be a class, say you have a class called basketball.

but you want to have multiple basketballs so in your code you create more than 1 basketball

say basketball1 and basketball2.
Then you run your application.
You now have 2 instances of the object basketball.

Class : A class is a blue print.
Object : It is the copy of the class.
Instance : Its a variable which is used to hold memory address of the object.

A very basic analytical example

Class House --> Blueprint of the house. But you can't live in the blue print. You need a physical House which is the instance of the class to live in. i.e., actual address of the object is instance. Instances represent objects.

Object refers to class and instance refers to an object.In other words instance is a copy of an object with particular values in it.