Curl vs Wget

The main differences, curl is my rock.

`What both commands do?`

Both are command line tools that can download contents from FTP, HTTP and HTTPS
Both can send HTTP POST requests
Both support HTTP cookies
Both are designed to work without user interaction, like from within scripts
Both are fully open source and free software
Both projects were started in the 90s
Both support metalink

`What's make them different?`

Curl

Library

Curl is powered by libcurl - a cross-platform library with a stable API that can be used by each and everyone. This difference is major since it creates a completely different attitude on how to do things internally. It is also slightly harder to make a library than a command line tool.

Pipes

Curl works more like the traditional unix cat command, it sends more stuff to stdout, and reads more from stdin in a everything is a pipe manner. Wget is more like cp, using the same analogue.

Single shot

Curl is basically made to do single-shot transfers of data. It transfers just the URLs that the user specifies, and does not contain any recursive downloading logic nor any sort of HTML parser.

More protocols. curl supports FTP, FTPS, Gopher, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS, FILE, POP3, IMAP, SMB/CIFS, SMTP, RTMP and RTSP. Wget only supports HTTP, HTTPS and FTP.

More portable. curl builds and runs on lots of more platforms than wget. For example: OS/400, TPF and other more "exotic" platforms that aren't straight-forward unix clones.

More SSL libraries and SSL support. curl can be built with one out of eleven (11!) different SSL/TLS libraries, and it offers more control and wider support for protocol details.

HTTP auth. curl supports more HTTP authentication methods, especially over HTTP proxies: Basic, Digest, NTLM and Negotiate

SOCKS. curl supports several SOCKS protocol versions for proxy access

Bidirectional. curl offers upload and sending capabilities. Wget only offers plain HTTP POST support.

HTTP multipart/form-data sending, which allows users to do HTTP "upload" and in general emulate browsers and do HTTP automation to a wider extent

curl supports gzip and deflate Content-Encoding and does automatic decompression

curl offers and performs decompression of Transfer-Encoded HTTP, wget doesn't

curl supports HTTP/2 and it does dual-stack connects using Happy Eyeballs

Much more developer activity. While this can be debated, I consider three metrics here: mailing list activity, source code commit frequency and release frequency. Anyone following these two projects can see that the curl project has a lot higher pace in all these areas, and it has been so for 10+ years. Compare on openhub

View Video on link Here

Wget

`Wget is command line only. There's no library.`

Recursive! Wget's major strong side compared to curl is its ability to download recursively, or even just download everything that is referred to from a remote resource, be it a HTML page or a FTP directory listing.

#####Older.
Wget has traces back to 1995, while curl can be tracked back no earlier than the end of 1996.

GPL. Wget is 100% GPL v3. curl is MIT licensed.

GNU. Wget is part of the GNU project and all copyrights are assigned to FSF. The curl project is entirely stand-alone and independent with no organization parenting at all with almost all copyrights owned by Daniel.

Wget requires no extra options to simply download a remote URL to a local file, while curl requires -o or -O.

Wget can be typed in using only the left hand on a qwerty keyboard!

Wget supports only GnuTLS or OpenSSL for SSL/TLS support

Wget supports only Basic auth as the only auth type over HTTP proxy

Wget has no SOCKS support

Its ability to recover from a prematurely broken transfer and continue downloading has no counterpart in curl.

Wget enables more features by default: cookies, redirect-following, time stamping from the remote resource etc. With curl most of those features need to be explicitly enabled.

`Additional Stuff`

Some have argued that I should compare uploading capabilities with wput, but that's a separate tool/project and I don't include that in this comparison.

Two other capable tools with similar feature set include aria2 and axel (dead project?) - try them out!

For a stricter feature by feature comparison (that also compares other similar tools), see the curl comparison table

Thanks Credits Daniel Stenberg. Feedback and improvements by: Micah Cowan, Olemis Lang
Source: https://daniel.haxx.se/ & https://goo.gl/KisqZa