curl

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(S), GOPHER(S), HTTP(S), SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP(S), MQTT, FILE, POP3(S), IMAP(S), SMB(S), SMTP(S), RTMP, RTSP and WS(S). Wget only supports HTTP(S) 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. curl requires but a C89 compiler. 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, Negotiate and AWS v4 signatures. SOCKS : curl supports SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 for proxy access. With local or proxy based name resolving. curl supports HTTPS proxy , that is HTTPS to the proxy. Wget does not. Bidirectional : curl offers upload and sending capabilities. Wget only offers plain HTTP POST support. curl supports gzip, brotli, zstd and deflate Content-Encoding and does automatic decompression . 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 . Wget supports only Basic auth as the only auth type over HTTP proxy. Its ability to recover from a prematurely broken transfer and continue downloading has no counterpart in curl. There's a 'Wget' in BusyBox, there's no curl there (it is not the actual Wget, just a stripped down clone with the same name). Wget has (recursive) downloading powers that curl does not feature and it also handle download retries over unreliable connections possibly slightly more effective. For just about everything else, curl is probably the more suitable tool. In recent years, Wget2 is worked on to become the replacement for Wget. This comparison will eventually get Wget2 details as well. Two other capable tools with similar feature set include aria2 and axel try them out! wcurl is a tool by the curl project that like Wget can download URLs without needing any additional options.