What is the difference between a Free SSL Certificate rather than a paid one?

back in the day you had advantages like the "big green bar of trust" with the company info etc. but that's now long gone.

the biggest advantage in a paid ssl cert is that you can buy it for "x" amount of time.
let's encrypt HAS to be revalidated every 3 months. that can make some difficulties in setups with reverse proxys or for example cloudflare if you want to use the "strict" encryption.

I personally just buy paid ones when I don't want to fuck around with the 3 month revalidation peroid.

Really don't think half the people in this thread understand what they're speaking about... The level of security and "warranty" is the same. Free SSL normally only verifies the ownership of the domain, however paid SSL verifies the domain and organisation. There's definitely some benefits to a paid SSL such as search engine ranking!