McKinley cut the number of civil servants, Roosevelt increased them.
McKinley believed that government should only attempt to reign in business when a corporation had a monopoly of interstate commerce. Roosevelt, on the other hand:
As President, Roosevelt held the ideal that the Government should be the great arbiter of the conflicting economic forces in the Nation, especially between capital and labor, guaranteeing justice to each and dispensing favors to none. (From the whitehouse.gov website). They had severe differences on the constitutional role of a President, as this quote from Roosevelt makes clear:
"Under this interpretation of executive power I did and caused to be done many things not previously done by the President," he wrote. "I did not care a rap for the mere form and show of power; I cared immensely for the use that could be made of the substance."
Roosevelt was the first President to intervene in labor disputes, a role which McKinley never would have imagined as being proper for the chief executive.
Maybe you can delineate how you think they were the same? It is commonly accepted that Roosevelt was a radical departure from his predecessors. McKinley's administration featured none of the reform goals, such as antitrust and worker protection, that the progressive Roosevelt would advocate after the turn of the century. McKinley never expanded the power of the Presidency the way Roosevelt did. Simply stated, they were not very similar, at all. One was a conservative Republican. The other was a Republican Progressive.