The most notable difference between the session-based and token-based authentication is that former relies heavily on the server.
A record is created for each logged-in user.
Token-based authentication is stateless - it does not store anything on the server but creates a unique encoded token that gets checked every time a request is made.
Unlike session-based authentication, a token approach would not associate a user with login information but with a unique token that is used to carry client-host transactions.
Many applications, including Facebook, Google, and GitHub, use the token-based approach.