Compare curl with other download tools
This comparison only involves entirely free and open source software.
| Feature | curl | wget | wget2 | fetch | lftp | aria2 | HTTrack | HTTPie | xh | 
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| .netrc | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | |
| Bandwidth Limiting | + | + | + | + | + | + | |||
| Commercial support | + | ||||||||
| DNS-over-HTTPS | + | ||||||||
| ECH | + | ||||||||
| FTP 3rd Party Transfer | + | ||||||||
| FTP Active Mode | + | + | + | + | + | + | |||
| FTP Connection Reuse | + | + | + | + | |||||
| FTP Kerberos | + | ||||||||
| FTP Ranges | + | ||||||||
| FTP Resume | + | + | + | + | + | + | |||
| FTP Upload | + | + | |||||||
| FTPS | + | + | |||||||
| GOPHER | + | + | |||||||
| GOPHERS | + | ||||||||
| H2/H3 Happy Eyeballs | + | ||||||||
| Happy Eyeballs | + | ||||||||
| HAPROXY protocol | + | ||||||||
| HSTS | + | + | + | ||||||
| HTTP alt-svc | + | ||||||||
| HTTP AWS Sigv4 Auth | + | ||||||||
| HTTP brotli | + | + | + | ||||||
| HTTP Cookies | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | |
| HTTP Digest Auth | + | + | + | + | + | + | |||
| HTTP etags | + | ||||||||
| HTTP gzip | + | + | + | + | + | + | |||
| HTTP Multipart POST | + | + | + | ||||||
| HTTP Negotiate Auth | + | + | |||||||
| HTTP NTLM Auth | + | + | + | + | |||||
| HTTP Persistent Conns | + | + | + | + | + | ||||
| HTTP POST | + | + | + | + | + | + | |||
| HTTP POST Chunked | + | ||||||||
| HTTP Proxy | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | 
| HTTP PUT | + | + | + | ||||||
| HTTP Ranges | + | ||||||||
| HTTP Redirects | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | ||
| HTTP Resume | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | |
| HTTP time conditions | + | + | + | ||||||
| HTTP zstd | + | + | + | ||||||
| HTTP/1.1 | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | 
| HTTP/2 ALPN | + | + | + | ||||||
| HTTP/2 h2c upgrade | + | + | |||||||
| HTTP/2 to proxy | + | ||||||||
| HTTP/3 | + | + | |||||||
| HTTPS | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | 
| HTTPS Proxy | + | + | |||||||
| HTTPS-RR | + | ||||||||
| IDN hostnames | + | + | + | + | |||||
| IMAP | + | ||||||||
| In development | + | + | + | + | + | + | |||
| IPv6 | + | + | + | + | + | yes* | + | + | + | 
| IPFS gateway | + | ||||||||
| LDAP | + | ||||||||
| library / API | + | + | |||||||
| Metalink | + | + | + | ||||||
| MQTT | + | ||||||||
| Multilingual Messages | + | + | + | + | |||||
| Multiple URLs | + | + | + | + | + | + | |||
| Parallel transfers | + | + | + | + | |||||
| POP3 | + | ||||||||
| Recursive downloads | + | + | + | + | |||||
| Retry failed downloads | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | ||
| RTMP | + | ||||||||
| RTSP | + | ||||||||
| Same file multi connect | + | + | + | ||||||
| SCP | + | ||||||||
| SFTP | + | + | + | ||||||
| SMB | + | ||||||||
| SMTP | + | ||||||||
| SOCKS4 | + | + | + | ||||||
| SOCKS5 | + | + | + | + | |||||
| SOCKS5 proxy resolve | + | ||||||||
| TELNET | + | ||||||||
| TFTP | + | ||||||||
| Tiny Executable | + | ||||||||
| TLS: Client certs | + | + | + | + | + | ||||
| TLS: Early Data/0RTT | + | ||||||||
| TLS: GnuTLS | + | + | + | + | + | yes* | |||
| TLS: mbedTLS | + | ||||||||
| TLS: OpenSSL | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | |
| TLS: rustls | + | + | |||||||
| TLS: Schannel | + | yes* | |||||||
| TLS: Secure Transport | yes* | ||||||||
| TLS: Session ID cache | + | + | |||||||
| TLS: WolfSSL | + | + | |||||||
| Unix domain socket | + | + | |||||||
| URL globbing/sequences | + | + | + | + | |||||
| Username/Password | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | + | 
| Windows Port | + | + | + | + | + | yes* | + | ||
| WebSocket | + | ||||||||
| License | MIT | GPL | GPL | BSD | GPL | GPL | GPL | BSD | MIT | 
| Version | 8.16.0 | 1.25.0 | 2.1.0 | 4.7 | 3.5.0 | 1.8.3 | 3.43 | 3.2.2 | 0.25.0 | 
The mentioned tools: wget, wget2, lftp, aria2, httrack, HTTPie, xh
'Fetch' is an integral part of the FreeBSD operating system.
* aria2 supports IPv6 only in HTTP(S) download
* HTTPie is written in Python + Requests and thus carry their portability and features
"In development" - releases or new things done to the project within the last couple of years.
Please file a bug report if this table is incorrect, or tell us other features we should compare!