curl vs wget — What's the Difference?

Both curl and wget fetch content over HTTP(S) from the command line, but they're built for different primary use cases.

Key points

• wget is built for downloading files, including recursively mirroring entire sites, and works well non-interactively
• curl is built for talking to APIs — it supports far more protocols and gives fine-grained control over headers, methods, and request bodies
• curl prints response content to standard output by default; wget saves it to a file by default

Example

curl -X POST https://api.example.com/data -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"key":"value"}'