They're very similar, but with very different ergonomics. Go channels are part of the language, so libraries use them frequently, whereas tokio is a separate library and not nearly as ubiquitous. So you'll get stuff like this:

c := make(chan bool)
go func () {
    time.Sleep(time.Second*2)
    c &lt;- true
} ()

select {
case val := &lt;-c:
case _ := &lt;-time.After(time.Second)
}

This lets you implement a simple timeout for a channel read. So the barrier to using them is really low, so they get used a ton.

I haven't looked at the implementation of tokio channels, so I don't know if there's something subtly different, but they do have the same high level functionality.