Masternode vs Staking

The Weight of the Network is a figure given to the All the coins that are actively Staking on the entire XLR Network. The Coins in your Wallet that are available for Staking also has a Weight. If the Weight of the Network is 8000 and the Weight of your Coins is 2000 then you have a good chance of Minting some new coins. However if the Weight of your Coins is just 1 then the chance of you Minting some new coins are remote. The Weight of the Coin is also slightly influenced by Coin Age. As a coin gets older so does the weight and your chance of Minting coins increases slightly.

Masternode

+ Better rewards (in most cases)

+ More predictable profitability & payout rate by looking masternode stat pages

+ Ability to vote on proposals

+ Can be hosted away from your main wallet with the coins

- Higher running cost due to higher resource requirement

- Not the easiest to setup and troubleshoot when you run into issues

- Require exactly 1,000 XLR to setup 1 masternode

Staking

+ Ease of setup. (just have coins in the wallet, put staking=1 in conf then unlock it to start staking)

+ No initial startup time (payout delay) unlike a masternode requiring 1-2 days when it's first started.

+ Flexible (less penalty/delay for being offline for over an hour like a masternode)

+ No minimum or specific amount of XLR is needed to activate staking. 

- Unpredictable profitability & frequency of payout

- Most likely less payout amount / frequency than masternode (due to higher competition & lower block reward)