Selenium IDE worked only in Mozilla while RC and WebDriver work in IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and many other browsers.
Record and Playback are not supported by Selenium WebDriver and RC, while on the other hand they are supported by Selenium IDE.
A disadvantage of Selenium RC is that it requires the user to start a server before a script is executed. However, WebDriver, as well as IDE, does not require the user to start any server.
Coming to the application type, Selenium IDE is a GUI based plug-in. Selenium RC is a standalone application based on Java which allows the user to execute HTML based test suites. But WebDriver being a core API offers multilingual support over different programming languages with the help of bindings.
The core engine of Selenium IDE and RC is based on JavaScript, while on WebDriver, there is no core engine and the application can be worked with natively using only the browser.
Compared to IDE and RC, Selenium WebDriver can be a bit complex since the API is larger.
In Selenium IDE the APIs aren’t object-oriented. It’s a little object-oriented for RC, while on WebDriver, all the APIs are completely objected oriented in nature.
Selenium IDE and RC do not support mouse cursor movement while WebDriver supports both as well as the movement of the mouse cursor.
Selenium WebDriver supports listeners whose implementation is not supported by RC or IDE.
Finally, as discussed above, iOS and Android application testing is supported in WebDriver and not in RC or IDE.