Yes. The key difference is that Publish to Hard Drive maintains a relationship between the exported files and the original photos in Lightroom, while Export is typically a one-time output.

With Publish, Lightroom tracks the published images, so if you later change an edit—such as white balance—you can republish and Lightroom will update those JPEGs for you. This makes Publish especially useful for batches or ongoing sets of images.

With Export, Lightroom simply writes out new files using your chosen settings. If you later edit the originals, Lightroom does not automatically manage or update those previously exported copies; you would usually need to export again yourself.

A limitation of Publish is that it depends on Lightroom still knowing where those published files are. If you move or edit the exported files outside Lightroom, that link can be broken.

So, in short:

• Export = simple, one-off file creation
• Publish to Hard Drive = managed output that can be updated later from Lightroom