If you have met contracts for difference before, a tokenized stock will feel familiar. That familiarity is worth checking, because the overlap is narrower than it looks.
The real share
You buy the share through a broker. The broker holds it, usually in street name, which means the company's register shows a nominee rather than your name. You get dividends as cash, you get a vote, and the register is the record.
A contract for difference
You own nothing. You have a contract with a provider that pays the difference between the opening and closing price. It is a bilateral position: your counterparty is the provider, the provider's solvency is your exposure, and the record of your position is the provider's book.
CFDs are typically leveraged, they usually carry a financing cost for holding a position overnight, and in a number of jurisdictions they are restricted or banned for retail investors. That regulatory history is context for the comparison rather than a comment on the tokens.
A tokenized stock
The answer here depends on the issuer, because tokenized stocks are not one thing.
In the one-to-one backed structures, a real share exists. Backed, through xStocks, states its certificates are collateralized one to one by the share it tracks, held with a custodian. Nothing is held in a CFD, which makes that a wide gap.
In the debt-security structure, Robinhood states it issues its stock tokens as debt securities, which is a claim on the issuer. In one respect that sits closer to the CFD case: what stands behind your position is a company's obligation rather than a specific share held for you.
Anybody answering "is a tokenized stock like a CFD" for the whole category is overreaching.
The three differences that hold across all of them
Settlement. A token settles on a public blockchain, all day, every day. A share settles through market infrastructure on business days. A CFD is marked and closed rather than settled at all.
Transferability. You can send a token to someone else, and you generally cannot assign a CFD. This is a real functional difference, and it is also why passing a shareholder vote through to token holders is hard.
Whether anyone can check. A CFD position lives in your provider's records. A tokenized stock's supply, its holders, and every corporate action are on a public ledger that needs no account to read. When Robinhood processed a distribution for ORCL, the transaction was public within seconds and we could link it. Neither of the other two offers that.
What none of them changes
Not one of the three makes you a shareholder of record with your name on the company's books. Direct registration does that, and it is a different arrangement from all three. The glossary has the definitions.
We are not telling you which of these to use, and this is not advice. "It tracks the price" is the least informative thing you can know about any of them. What you are exposed to, and who has to be solvent for your position to be worth what the screen says, is the question that separates them.
Each issuer page prints its own wrapper description, and how to buy covers the practical routes.