No, they’re not the same. APFS has many advantages over NTSF just because it’s much newer and designed from the ground up for more modern computing. When it comes to:
Disk Duplication – stores identical blocks of data only once to your hard drive.
Journaled files system keeps track of changes not yet committed to the file system’s main part by recording the goal of such changes in a data structure known as a “journal”.
Copy On Write – makes for better writing data to your hard drive. It will ensure that data that is being saved has a higher chance of not being corrupted, increases write operation, and reduces disk usage/
SSD Optimized.
Versioning – when you change a file each version is stored on your disk for a period of time in case you want to revert back to the previous version it’s much easier to do so.
Double the number of total files that can be stored on APFS as compared to the most aggressive NTFS limit.
Total disk capacity is equal to the largest capacity usable by the most recent NTFS systems.
Built-in file and disk encryption, similar to NTFS.