Two raags can share every note and still sound completely different. The difference lives in the aroha, the avroh, and the pakad, not the notes themselves.
It is tempting to think of a raag as "a scale with a mood attached." That gets you partway there, but it misses what actually makes a raag recognizable the moment you hear it.
The aroha (ascending movement) and avroh (descending movement) are often not the same set of notes played backwards. A raag can skip notes going up that it uses going down, or vice versa. The pakad is a short, characteristic phrase that identifies the raag almost like a signature.
This is also why Swaranjani organizes learning around raags and their families (thaat), rather than a flat list of "Course 1, Course 2, Course 3." Learning Raag Yaman well makes the next raag in its family easier, the same way it would with a real guru guiding your sequence, not because of an algorithm, but because that is how the tradition itself is structured.