60 lines (36 loc) · 1.46 KB

wcurl vs Wget

The main differences.

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
supports HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 by default, can do HTTP/3 with some determination

Wget / Wget2

a stand-alone executable
downloads URLs serially (Wget2 uses parallel transfers)
supports only HTTP/1 (Wget2 also does HTTP/2, neither does HTTP/3)
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.