Is rooting an android device essentially the same as jailbreaking and iphone?

I have an orange San Diego and pretty much all the screen capture applications say that I need my phone to be rooted. As far as I understand it, rooting is just the same as jailbreaking, but I could be wrong. Could someone please explain to me what it is and possibly the best way to go about doing it?

Rooting your android device is just like getting Administrative permission on Linux, which means that with rooting you can avoid the limitations that are done to your hardware, so you can replace the system applications as an example or run applications that requires Administrator-level permission, so you can do what is inaccessible to a normal android user.
Usually no applications that has to work with the system of your device runs without rooting, a good example is avast firewall, which can block the incoming/outgoing packets needed by other applications ( simply blocking their connection to the internet), a thing I use for privacy reasons, and this can't work without rooting your device.
I hope this gives you a simple idea about what rooting is.
Jailbreaking, in the other hand, is just to allow you to use applications that are not signed by apple, which is a -must- in UnJailBroken devices.