We demonstrate that the recently proposed soft gluon factorization (SGF) is equivalent to the nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization for heavy quarkonium production or decay, which means that for any given process these two factorization theories are either both valid or both violated. We use two methods to achieve this conclusion. In the first method, we apply the two factorization theories to the physical process $J/psi to e^+e^-$. Our explicit calculation shows that both SGF and NRQCD can correctly reproduce low energy physics of full QCD, and thus the two factorizations are equivalent. In the second method, by using equations of motion we successfully deduce SGF from NRQCD effective field theory. By identifying SGF with NRQCD factorization, we establish relations between the two factorization theories and prove the generalized Gremm-Kapustin relations as a by product. Comparing with the NRQCD factorization, the advantage of SGF is that it resums the series of relativistic corrections originated from kinematic effects to all powers, which gives rise to a better convergence in relativistic expansion.