curl vs Wget

curl vs Wget

This document started off as a blogentry, but I decided that I should better make a permanent home for thisas 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 codeto Wget as well.

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

What both 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

How they differ

curl

Wget

Features and is powered by libcurl - a cross-platform library witha stable API that can be used by each and everyone. This difference is majorsince it creates a completely different attitude on how to do thingsinternally. It is also slightly harder to make a library than a "mere" commandline tool. Pipes. curl is more in the traditionalunix-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 ofdata. It transfers just the URLs that the user specifies, and does not containany 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. Wgetonly supports HTTP, HTTPS and FTP. More portable. curl builds and runs on lots of more platforms thanwget. For example: OS/400, TPF and other more "exotic" platforms that aren'tstraight-forward unix clones. More SSL libraries and SSL support. curl can be built with one outof ten (10!) different SSL/TLS libraries, and it offers more control and widersupport for protocol details curl supports more HTTP authentication methods, and especiallywhen you try over HTTP proxies: Basic, Digest, NTLM and Negotiate curl supports lots of various SOCKS protocol versions for proxyaccess Bidirectional. curl offers upload and sending capabilities. Wgetonly 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 http2 and it does dual-stack connects usingHappy Eyeballs. curl supports metalink, wget hassupport for it coming (not yet released) Much more developer activity. While this can be debated, Iconsider three metrics here: mailing list activity, source code commitfrequency and release frequency. Anyone following these two projects can seethat the curl project has a lot higher pace in all these areas, and it hasbeen so for 10+ years. Compareon ohloh.net

Wget is command line only. There's no lib or anything. Recursive! Wget's major strong side compared to curl is itsability to download recursively, or even just download everything that isreferred to from a remote resource, be it a HTML page or a FTP directorylisting. Older. Wget has traces back to 1995, while curl can betracked back no earlier than the end of 1996. GPL. Wget is 100% GPL v3. curl is MIT licensed. GNU. Wget is part of the GNUproject and all copyrights are assigned to FSF. The curl project is entirely stand-aloneand independent with no organization parenting at all - with almost allcopyrights 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 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 Wget can be typed in using only the left hand on a qwerty keyboard!

Additional Stuff

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

For a stricter feature by feature comparison (that also compares othersimilar tools), see the curl comparisontable

Thanks

Feedback and improvements by: Micah Cowan, Olemis Lang

Updates

• Dec 2013 - curl supports ten SSL libs, converted to a table layout
• 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.

Updated: April 3, 2014 15:11 (Central European, Stockholm Sweden)

http://daniel.haxx.se/docs/curl-vs-wget.html