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I work for the State government and we are now receiving requests for QGIS shapefiles. We have worked with ArcGIS shapefiles in the past.
Are shapefiles used in QGIS stored the same way as regular shapefiles?
No one in our section has used QGIS, as we have an Esri enterprise license.
This answer is the synthesis of the two comments, @Erik and mine.
Shapefile is a GIS file format. Shapefiles are a format invented and controlled by Esri (the term proprietary is discutable, see the comments of this answer), but with a large open specifications for interoperability (GIS & CAD software mainly).
Following the documentation, this is the same format, the only "small" difference can be in the sidecar files, QGIS can have "qix" for spatial index and "qpj" for projections, see here.
The only thing not compatible between ArcGIS and QGIS are the style files which come with some shapefiles : *.lyr, *.style for ArcGIS and *.qml, *.sld for QGIS.
Over the last few years the open source community tried to push the geopackage file format, which solves some issues which Shapefile format suffer from.
This is a comment but it won't fit in the space allowed so I'll make it a supplemental answer. Shapefiles are read by both ArcGIS and QGIS (and many other programs) and we have both programs in widespread use. There's one very minor thing to note. If ArcGIS is used to create a spatial index it adds sbn and sbx files to the shapefile collection. QGIS can read these but not write or update them. QGIS can create qix spatial indexes that ArcGIS can't see, so ArcCatalog doesn't copy or delete them when it moves or deletes a shapefile. It’s possible after editing in either program the shapefile's spatial index (if there is one) needs to be updated, or the index files deleted, to prevent draw and other oddities. This is likely not a problem at all if you are just providing files, and you could decide to not provide any index files as they aren't required. But if you are in a mixed environment sharing edited files from both programs, users should be aware of this if they see missing shapes. In my workplace I don't create any qix, I typically only give others shapefiles without the sbn and sbx, and I use ArcCatalog to update the sbn and sbx files after editing in QGIS.
A thing I noticed when I switch from ArcGIS to QGIS : the .cpg (code page encoding) file isn't supported by QGIS. QGIS works with the dbf file's encoding. It's purely optional but it can have impact with some data with specific spellings. Just a minor difference.
Just use 4 files besides the one with the SHP extension, eg.,
mygovernment.shp
mygovernment.shx
mygovernment.dbf
mygovernment.prj
And be happy.
