Bulldozer or Excavator?

[Oddible]

I'm confused why I would want one vs the other? I've seen people select an excavator in a tutorial but I don't know why. Do they both overlap in what jobs they perform? How can I tell which is optimal for certain types of tasks?

[IntergalacticHouseOfPancakes™]

from my experience: dozers can flatten and level terrain while excavators raise and lower it i think.
excavators are used in the Groundworks phase of construction but both can be used for laying gravel for roads.
overall Excavators have more uses then Dozers but only Dozers can do the flatten/smooth terrain brush mode.

[千仞万渊]

Bulldozer: For faltten option, wont eliminate soil just push it aside.
Excavator:For raise/lower terrain, directly eliminate soil.

For self building, bulldozer is to paving gravel, excavator is forbdigging foundation.

[Tryst49]

From my experience on building sites, an excavator (AKA a 360) can flatten the terrain but it is a long and very labourious process. A bulldozer can do a large area a lot more quickly and efficiently. Bulldozers don't have the ability to dig trenches for foundations and utility pipes like an excavator, so both machines have very specific uses.

While there are bulldozers with a bucket on the rear, they are inefficient for digging anything but a small, shallow trench. They also have limited angle for digging without moving the entire machine.

Similarly, excavators can have a blade for flattening on the front but it is a lot smaller than a bulldozers blade and the engine is not powerful enough to move large amounts of dirt or smash up old tarmac roads as they go, having only around 1/4 or less of the HP a bulldozer has. Generally, the blades on excavators are used to fill in trenches faster than moving the dirt pile one bucketload at a time, also considering the dirt is loose rather than hard and packed.

Therefore, both can overlap to some degree but not enough to make it more efficient to use one machine for both jobs.