Ah I just assumed since the software seems to list number of blocks instead of block number there would be a difference of one since the first block was number 0.
Both Bitcoin and BBE consider the genesis block to be block 0. Bitcoin's
getblockcount is named very misleadingly (for historical reasons): it actually reports the block number instead of the block count. There's actually
getblockcount+1 blocks if you count the genesis block.