Nonlocally related systems, obtained through conservation law and symmetry-based methods, have proved to be useful for determining nonlocal symmetries, nonlocal conservation laws, non-invertible mappings and new exact solutions of a given partial differential equation (PDE) system. In this paper, it is shown that the symmetry-based method is a differential invariant-based method. It is shown that this allows one to naturally extend the symmetry-based method to ordinary differential equation (ODE) systems and to PDE systems with at least three independent variables. In particular, we present the situations for ODE systems, PDE systems with two independent variables and PDE systems with three or more independent variables, separately, and show that these three situations are directly connected. Examples are exhibited for each of the three situations.