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Wget is a simple transfer utility, while curl offers so much more. Curl provides the libcurl library, which can be expanded into GUI applications. Wget, on the other hand, is a simple command-line utility. Wget supports fewer protocols compared to cURL.
wget 's major strong side compared to curl is its ability to download recursively. wget is command line only. There's no lib or anything, but curl 's features are powered by libcurl. curl supports FTP , FTPS , HTTP , HTTPS , SCP , SFTP , TFTP , TELNET , DICT , LDAP , LDAPS , FILE , POP3 , IMAP , SMTP , RTMP and RTSP .
Conclusion. Although, not very feature rich, but Wget is still doing the job pretty well, however, advance users will definitely prefer aria2 as it caters the needs for faster and simultaneous download.
If you are programming, you should use curl. It has a nice api and is available for most languages. Shelling out to the os to run wget is a kludge and shouldn't be done if you have an API interface!
There is some overlap in functionality. While GNU wget is a package for retrieving files using HTTP/FTP, curl transfers data with single URL. As noted in the link shared by MarkusQ, wget can download recursively - see this comparison article for more details by the curl author.
cURL is intended for data transfer in both directions while wget is for non-interactive downloading file(s) from a particular source. There are some overlaps in functionality, but they are not meant to do exactly the same things.
It really depends on what you are trying to do; for simpler tasks like downloading files wget and cURL are comparable, but this really only scratches the surface of either tool.
They both offer endless options, most of which I've never used. However, I tend to like wget more as it by default saves the output from the URL you give — perfect for downloading. Curl goes the other way, and displays the output directly to the terminal (by default).
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