Rendering

Cycles is a Ray based renderer while Eevee is a screen based renderer.

Eevee tries to keep things as simple as possible and kind of flat while cycles is trying to be as realistic as possible.

Eevee is a real-time renderer while cycles is more resource intensive and requires many samples to produce good results.

Surfaces that are emissive will have a much better render in Cycles than in Eevee.

Bloom, Ambient Occlusion (AO) and Screen Space Reflections (SSR) have been replaced by Glare (Compositing Editor) for Bloom and Ray Tracing for the other two since Blender v 4.2

Render animations using CTRL + F12 and view them using CTRL + F11.

In the Output tab (Properties panel) you can select which format to render. PNG has the advantage of enabling an alpha channel but also outputs an image sequence (collection of PNG files in the folder) which need to be stitched back together in a video editor. Another advantage of this method is the possibility to easily modify just one (or a few) frame(s) in the animation by re-exporting just those.

Video files (ffmpeg) make a single file but the entire animation needs to be re-rendered to make any modification.