Yes and no
One big difference is that the quorum.to database is shared in real-time among all receiving sites. Quorum tracks sender hosts, not individual senders, so only one user per sending domain need be inconvenienced. Some other challenge/response systems "don't scale" well because they don't share data among users in this way.
There is "hoop jumping" involved, which is similar to traditional challenge/response filtering, but quorum never generates challenge emails - the only challenge is provided to senders during the "SMTP converstation" - while the sender is trying to deliver mail, not after that mail has been delivered to the receiver's system. Because of this, the challenge won't bother anyone other than the sender. These unwanted challenge emails are a problem with traditional challenge/response - the challenge very often is sent to the wrong person, because the mail being challenged (almost always a spam message) has a forged sender address.
If you have a coded link to quorum from a message rejection, visit that page and follow the instructions there. If you do not, click "Lookup" and search for your IP address. Follow the instructions.