The main differences as I (Daniel Stenberg) see them. Please consider my bias towards curl since after all, curl is my baby - but I contribute to Wget as well.
Please let me know if you have other thoughts or comments on this document.
File issues or pull-requests if you find problems or have improvements.
- 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
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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 "mere" command line tool.
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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.
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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.
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More protocols. curl supports FTP(S), Gopher, HTTP(S), SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP(S), MQTT, FILE, POP3(S), IMAP(S), SMB/CIFS, SMTP(S), RTMP and RTSP. Wget supports HTTP(S) and FTP.
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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.
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More SSL libraries and SSL support. curl can be built with one out of thirteen (13!) different SSL/TLS libraries, and it offers more control and wider support for protocol details.
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HTTP auth. curl supports more HTTP authentication methods, especially over HTTP proxies: Basic, Digest, NTLM and Negotiate
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SOCKS. curl supports SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 for proxy access. With local or proxy based name resolving.
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Bidirectional. curl offers upload and sending capabilities. Wget only offers plain HTTP POST support.
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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
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curl supports gzip, brotli, zstd and deflate Content-Encoding and does automatic decompression
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curl offers and performs decompression of Transfer-Encoded HTTP, wget doesn't
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curl supports HTTP/2, HTTP/3, alt-svc and it does dual-stack connects using Happy Eyeballs
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curl can do many transfers in parallel (
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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 15+ years. Compare on openhub
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curl comes pre-installed on macOS and Windows 10. Wget does not.
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Wget is command line only. There's no library.
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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.
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Older. Wget has traces back to 1995, while curl can be tracked back no earlier than the end of 1996.
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GPL. Wget is GPL v3. curl is MIT licensed.
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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.
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Wget requires no extra options to simply download a remote URL to a local file, while curl requires -o or -O.
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Wget supports only GnuTLS or OpenSSL for SSL/TLS support
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Wget supports only Basic auth as the only auth type over HTTP proxy
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Wget has no SOCKS support
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Its ability to recover from a prematurely broken transfer and continue downloading has no counterpart in curl.
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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.
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There's a 'wget' in busybox, there's no curl there (within quotes since it is not the actual wget, just a stripped down clone)
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Wget can be typed in using only the left hand on a qwerty keyboard!
In recent years, wget2 is worked on to become the replacement for wget. This comparison will eventually get wget2 details as well.
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
Feedback and improvements by: Micah Cowan, Olemis Lang