**Short answer:** No practical, performance, or storage, difference.
**Long answer:**
There is essentially no difference (in MySQL) between `VARCHAR(3000)` (or any other large limit) and `TEXT`. The former will truncate at 3000 _characters_; the latter will truncate at 65535 _bytes_. (I make a distinction between _bytes_ and _characters_ because a character can take multiple bytes.)
For smaller limits in `VARCHAR`, there are some advantages over `TEXT`.
* "smaller" means 191, 255, 512, 767, or 3072, etc, depending on version, context, and `CHARACTER SET`.
* `INDEXes` are limited in how big a column can be indexed. (767 or 3072 _bytes_; this is version and settings dependent)
* Intermediate tables created by complex `SELECTs` are handled in two different ways -- MEMORY (faster) or MyISAM (slower). When 'large' columns are involved, the slower technique is automatically picked. (Significant changes coming in version 8.0; so this bullet item is subject to change.)
* Related to the previous item, all `TEXT` datatypes (as opposed to `VARCHAR`) jump straight to MyISAM. That is, `TINYTEXT` is automatically worse for generated temp tables than the equivalent `VARCHAR`. (But this takes the discussion in a third direction!)
* `VARBINARY` is like `VARCHAR`; `BLOB` is like `TEXT`.
* A table with several 'large' `VARCHARs` could hit a limit of 64KB for the whole table definition; switching to `TEXT` is a simple and practical fix. (Example:
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**Rebuttal to other answers**
The original question asked one thing (which datatype to use); the accepted answer answered something else (off-record storage). That answer is now out of date.
When this thread was started _and_ answered, there were only two "row formats" in InnoDB. Soon afterwards, two more formats (`DYNAMIC` and `COMPRESSED`) were introduced.
The storage location for `TEXT` and `VARCHAR()` is based on _size_, not on _name of datatype_. For an **updated** discussion of on/off-record storage of large text/blob columns, see [_this_](
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