Difference between Hibernate and Shutdown in Windows?

Question

I know that hibernate saves the currently opened programs and tasks to the hard drive while shutdown completely kills off all tasks and power down.
But what if I power on my pc and then immediately puts it into hibernate (no apps or tasks running then), will this be technically a shutdown?

Answer 1

To answer your question

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When you start your PC, there's services, drivers and some startup programs running in the background which you will close if you shut down and save if you hibernate, so it is not the same.

Some more info

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When you put your PC into hibernate mode, it saves all the open programs into a file on your boot drive, then it goes into a state comparable with the shut off state.

Because your hard drive or SSD is non-volatile, it will able to start all the programs that you had open when you put it into the hibernate state.

When you shut your computer off, all the programs are still in your RAM, because RAM is volatile memory, it gets wiped entirely when you shut down your PC.

Hybrid sleep

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There's a combination of both states as well, which is called hybrid sleep, it saves the programs in a file on your boot drive and in your RAM.

It allows you to resume your work quickly, using the RAM. But it saves everything in your boot file, if there's a power outage for example.