The English word covers at least two different projects, and Buddhist tradition distinguishes them more precisely than English does.
Samatha, calm abiding, is concentration training. Attention is placed on a single object, most often the breath, and returned to it every time it wanders, thousands of times, until it stays. The described results are stages of absorption of increasing steadiness and pleasantness. This is a skill, it improves with practice in a fairly ordinary way, and it is not itself held to liberate anybody.
Vipassana, insight, uses that steadiness to examine experience rather than to rest in it, looking for what the tradition claims will be found there: impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and the absence of a self anywhere in the process. The claim is that seeing this directly, as distinct from agreeing with it, is what changes a person.
Most Buddhist systems use both and differ mainly on the proportion and the order. Some Burmese methods hold that moderate concentration suffices and insight work can begin almost at once, which is what makes short lay retreats possible; more conservative teachers regard that as building on sand. The disagreement is technical and serious.
Classical Hindu meditation has a different destination altogether. The Yoga Sutras describe a progressive withdrawal ending in absorption, and the goal is the isolation of the seer from the movements of mind rather than the observation of them. The vocabulary overlaps with Buddhism heavily, the metaphysics is opposed, and the practices are not interchangeable. This is a good reason to be careful with meditation as a general category: it names a family of techniques aimed at incompatible ends, and the family resemblance can conceal how far apart they are.