User stories and use cases: what is the difference?

Common

Both take a usage centric approach.

Both are placeholders for a conversation.

Both result in test cases that represent the acceptance criteria.

Both can be estimated.

Use Cases

Big picture to help people understand the extent of the system and its value.

Dive further into describing how the user imagines interacting with the system to accomplish his objective.

Provide project participants with a structure and context that a collection of user stories lacks.

You can examine each element of a use case (flows, preconditions, postconditions, and so on) to look for pertinent functional and nonfunctional requirements and to derive tests. This helps you avoid overlooking any requirements.

Active scope management.

User story

Concise statement of a user’s needs.

Easy access to domain experts available (refine the story as needed).

More suited to act as a backlog item for daily activities (Scrum, Kanban, specification by example).

Explicit acceptance criteria.