This document started off as a blog entry, but I decided that I should better make a permanent home for this as I'm sure I'll get reasons to update and fix this as time goes by.

The main differences as I see them. Please consider my bias towards curl since after all, curl is my baby - but I have contributed code to Wget as well.

Please let me know if you have other thoughts or comments on this document.

• 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

• Features and 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 "mere" command line tool.
• Pipes. curl is more in the traditional unix-style, it sends more stuff to stdout, and reads more from stdin in a "everything is a pipe" manner.
• 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, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS, FILE, POP3, IMAP, SMTP, RTMP and RTSP. Wget 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 nine(9!) different SSL/TLS libraries, and it offers more control and wider support for protocol details
• curl (or rather libcurl) supports more HTTP authentication methods, and especially when you try over HTTP proxies: Basic, Digest, NTLM and Negotiate
• libcurl supports lots of various SOCKS protocol versions for proxy access, wget supports none
• 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 inflate Content-Encoding and does automatic decompression
• curl offers and performs decompression of Transfer-Encoded HTTP, wget doesn't
• curl supports metalink as of curl 7.27.0, wget has support for it coming in a Google Summer of Code project
• 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 indeed been so for many years.

• Wget is command line only. There's no lib or anything.
• 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 1997.
• 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. However trivial, this fact is often mentioned to me when people explain why they prefer downloading with wget.
• 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

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

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

Feedback and improvements by: Micah Cowan, Olemis Lang

• Jul 2012 - more SSL libs and metalink, clarify proxy auth and socks shortage in wget
• Aug 2011 - recent wget versions do HTTP 1.1 so I removed that paragraph, added other minor differences
• Jan 2011 - fixed the SSL library count again, added the "What both does" section
• Apr 2010 - added more protocols, and corrected the SSL library count. Minor language fix.