Both exist to give you 230 V where there is no socket. That is about all they have in common. A generator burns fuel to drive an alternator; a portable power station stores electricity in a battery and gives it back through an inverter. The choice is not settled on price, but on three questions.
1. Where are you going to use it?
This is the question that usually settles it, and it is not open to debate. A generator produces carbon monoxide, an odourless and lethal gas. It is never started in a garage, under an awning, inside a camper, or even near an open window. A station has no combustion and no exhaust: it runs indoors, in a tent, on a boat, next to a bed.
Noise points the same way. A portable generator runs at 55 to 70 dB a few metres away — a loud conversation, continuously. Many campsites and most marinas ban them outright, and the neighbours remember. A station is silent, apart from a fan that kicks in under heavy load.
2. For how long, and to do what?
This is where the generator keeps a real advantage, and it deserves saying. Its reserve is not in the machine but in the jerrycan: as long as you keep refilling it, it keeps going. To power a site for a full day, run a cement mixer or keep a house going for several days after a storm, nothing replaces it at the same budget.
A station has a finite reserve, expressed in watt-hours. A 1,024 Wh station gives back roughly 850 to 900 usable Wh; past that, it has to be recharged — from the mains, from a 12 V socket, or from a solar panel, which takes hours rather than minutes.
In other words: the generator wins on duration and on raw power, the station wins on everything else.
3. What are you willing to maintain?
A generator is a combustion engine. It wants oil watched, a spark plug, a filter, fuel that goes stale within months, and regular running or the carburettor gums up. A machine left at the back of a garage for six months rarely starts first time, and that is usually the day you need it.
A station needs no maintenance. It gets recharged two or three times a year if it is sitting idle, and that is all. The lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) cells used in our Volta stations take several thousand cycles and dislike only one thing: being left at zero for a long time.
The comparison nobody writes down
A 2,000 W generator does not replace a 2,000 W station in practice. The generator supplies those 2,000 W for hours; the station supplies them too, but only for a few tens of minutes, because its reserve runs out. Conversely, a 1,000 W station will hold a fridge and lighting all night, where the generator would have run noisily for next to nothing.
The short rule: high power for a long time, that is the generator. Moderate power, indoors, silent and maintenance-free, that is the station.
And for a van or a camper?
The station wins almost every time, for a plain reason: you do not carry petrol in a living space, and you do not run an engine at night on a stopover. The question then becomes sizing, which we cover in Portable power for a camper: how to size it properly.