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The term 3-tier (or n-tier) refers to an architecture, whereas MVC is an architectural design pattern. The main difference is that the former is distributed among different servers and the latter is located on a single machine.

Another difference is that MVC manages data in a triangular way, whereas 3-tier manages data in sequence, through a middle tier.

• A 3-tier system is separated into presentation, logic and data tiers. Presentation and data tiers never communicate directly.
• An MVC application has a view that updates the controller, a controller that updates the model and a view that gets updated by a model.

MVC is concerned with the presentation, so additional layers can be added for business logic (service) and data (dao), that are not part of MVC. That leads to one more difference: a 3-tier system has presentation as the first tier, but MVC is the whole presentation.