Pretty much, except that Solve uses restricted versions of some of the methods for solving transcendental systems, so it may fail for some transcendental problems that Reduce may solve.
Thank you! Is doing Solve with MaxExtraCondtions-> All going to give the same answer as Reduce every time as it did in Frank's response above?
Reduce[12 z^2 (-243 - 27 y + z^2) == 0, {z, y}, Reals] z == 0 || ((z < 0 || z > 0) && y == -((243 z^2 - z^4)/(27 z^2))) Limit[-((243 z^2 - z^4)/(27 z^2)), z -> 0] -9
