I've seen people have already cleared the confusion but there are further two types of fork. Hard forks and soft forks are essentially the same thing in that when a cryptocurrency's existing code is changed, an old version remains while a new version is created. However, with a soft fork, only one blockchain will remain valid as users adopt the update. Both forks create a split, but a hard fork creates two blockchains, and a soft fork is meant to result in one.