Cardinal is more UPS heavy; it has on_tick event always on and it processes every player every tick. Vehiclesnap activates with events, and skips every second tick. It is enough to feel smooth, but i don't know, Cardinal might be tiny bit more responsive.
Cardinal has more per-player options to finetune how the snapping happens.
Cardinal doesn't use global vars, so i am unsure if it's multiplayer compatible. Although i never tried the mod, it might be achieving what it does with only local vars, from a glance to source code.
And yes it doesn't have the quickbar button, but it's really new on this one too.
For future reference i base above on Cardinal 0.1.3.
I'm here wondering what the difference is too, and it seems the button is the only player noticeable difference...though i do play multiplayer so gonna test that out today with both mods. Will be a no brainer if cardinal can't do MP.