Similarity notions between vertices in a graph, such as structural and regular equivalence, are one of the main ingredients in clustering tools in complex network science. We generalise structural and regular equivalences for undirected hypergraphs and provide a characterisation of structural and regular equivalences of undirected graphs and hypergraphs through neighbourhood graphs and Ollivier-Ricci curvature. Our characterisation sheds new light on these similarity notions opening a new avenue for their exploration. These characterisations also enable the construction of a possibly wide family of regular partitions, thereby offering a new route to a task that has so far been computationally challenging.