Yes, the list and tuple objects are very similar in nature. Both are sequence data types being an ordered collection of ITEMS, not necessarily of the same type. However, there are a couple of subtle differences between the two.

First and foremost, a tuple is an IMMUTABLE object while a list is mutable. Which simply means that once created, a tuple cannot be modified in place (insert/delete/update operations cannot be performed) and the list can be modified dynamically. Hence, if a collection is unlikely to be modified during the course of the program, a tuple should be used. For example price of items.

Although both objects can contain items of different types, conventionally a list is used generally to hold similar objects – similar to an array in C/C++ or Java. Python tuple is preferred to set up a collection of heterogenous objects – similar to a STRUCT in C. CONSEQUENTLY, you would USE a list to store marks obtained by students, and a tuple to store coordinates of a point in cartesian system.

Internally too, Python uses tuple a lot for a number of purposes. For example, if a function returns more than one value, it is treated as a tuple.

Similarly if a function is capable of receiving multiple arguments in the form of *args, it is parsed as a tuple.

Python uses tuple to store many built-in data structures. For example time data is stored as a tuple.

Because of its immutable nature, a tuple can be used as a key in a dictionary, whereas a list can’t be used as key. Also, if you want to iterate over a large collection of items, tuple proves to be faster than a list.