WCF Data Services and WCF RIA Services differ in their supported clients, data access layers, and development approaches. WCF Data Services supports a wider range of clients via REST and OData, while WCF RIA Services is tailored more for Silverlight. WCF Data Services supports Entity Framework by default and other data access layers with more effort, while WCF RIA Services directly supports Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL, and POCO models. Client development with WCF Data Services requires notifying the context for changes, while WCF RIA Services supports self-tracking entities and synchronized logic.