Is there any difference between journals and conferences which charge money vs those which don't?
I must disagree with the CS folks in the comments†. Whether a journal charges or not is immaterial to the quality of the journal. You can only gauge its quality by being an active researcher in that field, not by silly metrics (this is an order of magnitude worse than impact factor).

Different journals from the same publishing house might also charge different rates for publications. For instance, AIP publishes both the Phys. Rev. series (+ PRL) and the J. Acoustical Society of America. While there are no charges for the former set, JASA has "voluntary" charges for publishing.

Such "voluntary" charges are very common (some flagship and top-of-the-line IEEE journals come to mind) and serves primarily as an opt-out for researchers from low income countries in Asia/Africa/S. America. Researchers in N. America, Europe and Australia/NZ are expected to pay the publishing charges, since with the way grants are structured in these countries, there is almost always a specific budget earmarked for publishing costs. Of course, if a researcher has no budget or is publishing in his spare time or as a secondary interest, then they're also welcome to not pay the charges, but I've never seen anyone that's on a grant decline to pay charges.

† Opinions on this site seem to be overrun by CS folks, who generally state them as facts of life. From my years of experience in a variety of fields, I've found their customs to be more of an outlier than the norm (perhaps only mathematics has something in common).