The advantage of hard template is to have a better control of the product, but it's difficult to remove the template and usually the remover is environmental-unfriendly. The soft template is relative easier to eliminate, however, the morphology control of your target products is hard to obtain.
To my knowledge, hard template has a solid structure like PS and silica, while soft templates don't have a firm structure like surfactant,some polymer and virus, etc.
The advantage of hard template is to have a better control of the product, but it's difficult to remove the template and usually the remover is environmental-unfriendly. The soft template is relative easier to eliminate, however, the morphology control of your target products is hard to obtain.