Food processors and blenders get confused for overlapping tools, but they're actually built for different jobs — a food processor's strength is precise, dry-ish chopping and shredding, not liquefying.
A different job than a blender
A blender is built around a tall, narrow jar and a vortex that pulls liquid-heavy ingredients down into the blades — great for smoothies, soups, and sauces, but poor at evenly chopping dry or semi-dry ingredients like vegetables, nuts, or dough. A food processor uses a wide, shallow bowl with interchangeable blades and discs, built for tasks like chopping vegetables evenly, shredding cheese, slicing consistently, or kneading dough — jobs a blender handles poorly or not at all. Buying one to replace the other usually leads to disappointment; they're complementary tools, not competing versions of the same thing.
The attachments determine real capability
The base chopping blade handles general chopping and pureeing reasonably well, but the shredding and slicing discs are what unlock a food processor's real time-saving value for tasks like prepping vegetables for a big batch of cooking or shredding a large amount of cheese. Checking which discs and blades are actually included, versus sold separately as accessories, matters more than the base motor specs for most everyday uses.
Bowl capacity affects more than batch size
A larger bowl handles bigger batches, but very small quantities can actually process less evenly in an oversized bowl, since ingredients have more room to move away from the blade instead of being consistently caught by it. If a lot of use will be small quantities — a single clove of garlic, a small amount of nuts — a smaller processor or one with a mini bowl attachment can genuinely outperform a large one for those specific tasks, not just save counter space.
The one thing people forget
Check the feed tube size and shape if slicing whole or large-cut vegetables is a priority — a narrow feed tube means pre-cutting vegetables into smaller pieces before they'll fit, which adds a prep step back in that the processor was supposed to save. A wider feed tube that fits things like a whole potato or a large carrot lengthwise genuinely saves more time in practice.