Both JBoss and Tomcat are Java servlet application servers, but JBoss is a whole lot more. The substantial difference between the two is that JBoss provides a full Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) stack, including Enterprise JavaBeans and many other technologies that are useful for developers working on enterprise Java applications.
Tomcat is much more limited. One way to think of it is that JBoss is a Java EE stack that includes a servlet container and web server, whereas Tomcat, for the most part, is a servlet container and web server.