It is not used for same purpose.SAP XI has lot of adapters like JDBC,RFC,IDOC,JMS,SOAP,HTTP and used typically to integrate hetrogenous enterprsie systems.
Sameer Shadab gave a great description on some other thread:
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guess you are talking about Business Connectors and XI.
If that is the case, the differences are,
SAP XI belongs to SAP Netweaver Technology, whereas BC is an Integration tool provided by Webmethods.
SAP XI is based on a model called "Hub & Spoke" and Business Connectors are "point to point". So by using XI, what happens is that you do not redesign Solutions once again.
With XI you save the entire integration knowledge of a collaborative process centrally in SAP XI: Objects at design time in the Integration Repository and objects at configuration time in the Integration Directory. In this way, SAP Exchange Infrastructure follows the principle of shared collaboration knowledge: You no longer need to search for information about a collaborative process in each of the systems involved, but can call this information centrally instead. This procedure considerably reduces the costs for the development and maintenance of the shared applications.
Also SAP XI comes with pre-configured solutions bundled along with it, so you can straight-away use the solution instead of redesigning.
Also i believe SAP XI is integrated as a required solution for some new mySAP solution like SRM, there are some scenarios within SRM requires SAP XI to be used and we cannot use BC's there.
But incase if you do not have multiple systems connected and communication is between just 2 systems, BC should be sufficient, instead of investing on XI.
But i guess slowly SAP will be stopping its support for BC, as SAP XI can do everything that BC does and even much more.
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