The difference is that if you want sovereignty of your own bitcoin on the lightning network you need to run the lightning daemon yourself, open a channel, and maintain it and deal with closures of the payment channel.
Payment channels are useful for some things, but you have to admit they are pretty much abandoning the typical cryptocurrency use case of just sending money to an address, even if the recipient is offline.
If we use this HTTP/email protocol comparison, an ordinary SPV wallet is like a web browser and a lightning network node is like a web server. Actually an email client/mail server is a better example.
Payment channels are useful for some things, but you have to admit they are pretty much abandoning the typical cryptocurrency use case of just sending money to an address, even if the recipient is offline.
If we use this HTTP/email protocol comparison, an ordinary SPV wallet is like a web browser and a lightning network node is like a web server. Actually an email client/mail server is a better example.