What is the difference between SharePoint designer workflows and Visual Studio workflows designer ??

If you are chef and working in the kitchen, sometimes you make dishes out of pre-cooked food, example will be canned food such as beans, tomatoes etc, those are precooked and you can use them to add to the dish you are making.
Alternative will be that if you cannot find in canned what you are looking for , in such scenario you have to use raw ingredient to cook everything SP Designer workflow is like a canned in the food, its pre-built (boiled and package) and you can open it modify it and use it quickly..
A Visual studio workflow will be the one developed Raw(using .NEt workflow foundation) another different is that you need server administrative right to install visual studio to the server, this workflow is compiled to a DLL and install in the server, where SPD workflow is a file (XAML) uploaded as content in the content database.

SharePoint designer worklows are SEQUENTIAL i.e., they can run from point a to point b but not back. they execute in a sequence.

Visual studio worklows are STATE MACHINE i.e., they can run from any point to any other point. They work like a finite state machine. 

 

Pls find the below table

as usual ,, visual studio is more advanced ,,, sharepoint designer is for simple workflows !