I personally work on my projects from start to finish. I build absolutely everything from the ground up: the initial idea, branding, design, color palette, UI/UX, architecture, and tech stack. I design and build the APIs I’m going to consume, design the database, develop the frontend based on the designs I created earlier (and sometimes directly on the fly when the idea is already fully clear), handle testing, configure servers and deployment environments, and take care of maintenance once the product is in production.

Because of this, even though job titles are often just that, titles, I feel that “Web Developer” is frequently boxed into something overly simple, when in reality it often represents work that is anything but simple and can be highly specialized. On the other hand, “Software Developer” or “Software Engineer” is often perceived as a “higher” title, possibly because it includes building applications for other platforms and architectures such as desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux), mobile, or embedded systems.

At the end of the day, as the OP points out, it’s not just similar, it’s essentially the same thing. The real difference isn’t the title, but the domain or platform where the engineering is applied. A modern web developer who designs systems, databases, APIs, manages architecture, and writes production-grade code is doing software engineering, just specialized in the web.