All right, I've read! I'm sort of referencing two different threads I'm involved in here but from the Django docs:
> Your models will be scanned and compared to the versions currently contained in your migration files, and then a new set of migrations will be written out. Make sure to read the output to see what makemigrations thinks you have changed - it’s not perfect, and for complex changes it might not be detecting what you expect.
So it's not different other than it can scan the changes in models to help create the migration which is a nice little convenience.