[hansvm]

The training process differs, but the resulting model only differs in data rather than code -- you evaluate a bunch of trees and add them up.

For better or for worse (usually for better), boosted decision trees work harder to optimize the tree structure for a given problem. Random forests rely on enough trees being good enough.

Ignoring tree split selection, one technique people sometimes do makes the two techniques more related -- in gradient boosting, once the splits are chosen it's a sparse linear algebra problem to optimize the weights/leaves (iterative if your error is not MSE). That step would unify some part of the training between the two model types.