There is a clear difference between a freelancer and an entrepreneur. However, most people tend to think that freelancers are entrepreneurs.
Freelancers are people who decide to directly provide their services to other people or companies without being directly employed. Most of the times, this is a chance to stop selling time hour by hour and start marketing a final product. Also, this offers freelancers the advantage of choosing the projects they want to take and the work schedule they want to have, and to charge differently depending on project.
Freelancers can also form groups or companies or work with different companies to enable them to take bigger or more complex projects. But this does not make them entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs build companies around an idea, a vision, a dream. They find the right people they need in order to cover the aspects they can not, and work on their vision. They are the leaders of the company, and not so much the workers, even if they do a lot of work themselves.
While for freelancers the work they do is the most important, for entrepreneurs the vision and leadership is what matters. Entrepreneurs are the ones who can be gone for a day, a week or a month and the company will still go ahead as planned; while freelancers have to be there and put in the work for things to get done.
While an entrepreneur can start a company, build it around it’s vision, make it work on it’s own and then move on to the next business, a freelancer will take an active part in the project until it is finished and delivered.