In theory they are different, but in reality people use backbone because they think it will help them reduce the bloat and mess in their code, when in fact backbone will not help with that.
For data binding there's tons of alternatives that co-exists nicely with Backbone, including Knockout via Knockback, or Rivets, or any number of modules written specifically to work with Backbone - the choice of data-binding mechanism is orthogonal to the choice of using Backbone or not.