As far as legal definitions are concerned, advice can be given by anyone, but only a licensed practitioner could provide counseling. In general aspects when a person seeks advice, he or she gets multiple advices from different persons. Each suggesting a plan of action for you to follow from their own point of view, but these different solutions which are supposed to help you could actually confuse you. Where as a counselor would never tell you what to do, rather they guide you and together you are able to find a feasible solution to your problem.
Some more points to consider are :
Definition : In counseling a counselor and client works as a team and collaborated efforts are made to understand the client’s problems and bring about a feasible solution to it.
Whereas, advice is just a common recommendation or opinion offered by someone based on his common knowledge, life experience and personal beliefs.
Motive : A counselor have somewhat a different motive from other individuals. You could get advice from your family, friends and several other sources, but that is not what counselors intend to do. A counselor works on strengthening and empowering you to find out the best solution to your problem. Counselor helps you in getting answers to your questions on your own. Getting advice may act as a temporary solution, but a counselor works on your self-realization ability and intends to help you on realizing the best possible solution to your problems.
Approach : An advice giver would just listen to your problem and come up instantly with solution to your problem. But this method actually in practical approach falls back as you never get the opportunity to self realize your problem in depth or to introspect yourself. Whereas, a counselor makes you fully aware of your strengths and weaknesses and help you to find solution to problem on your own. In advising, you would get advices and still be on the same platform if face any other problem and again seeking for advices from others. On the other hand, any counselor would work on your self-realization and decision making ability to empower you to make your own decisions.
Time involved : In case of taking advice, it is often quick whereas in case of counseling, it takes a lot of collective efforts to be done from both counselor and the client. Counseling works on long term benefit and enables you to solve your problems on your own again in future. Once a person learns how to self realize himself and analyze the situations, he enables himself to cope up with situations and find a workable solution to his problems.
