Related: curl vs Wget, curl vs libcurl and curl vs HTTPie.

wcurl vs Wget

The main differences.

• wcurl
• Wget

File issues or pull-requests if you find problems or have improvements to this comparison.

What both commands do/are

• command line tools that can download URLs from FTP, HTTP(S)
• work without user interaction
• fully open source and free software
• portable and run on many operating systems
• follow redirects automatically
• get the remote file's time and set it locally
• retry on transient errors

How they differ

wcurl

• a shell script that invokes curl

• downloads URLs in parallel

• curl licensed

• supports all the URL schemes curl does, many more than wget

• happy eyeballs connections

• is a little complicated to run on Windows

Wget

• a stand-alone executable

• downloads URLs serially

• Recursive!: Wget's major strong side compared to wcurl 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.

• GPL: Wget is GPL v3

• enables cookies by default

• works on Windows

When to use which

Primarily: use the one that gets the job done for you.