What's the difference between socat and netcat?

Solution 1:

socat can do serial line stuff, netcat cannot. socat can do fairly advanced functionality, like having multiple clients listen on a port, or reusing connections.

Solution 2:

Netcat is like socat with only the STDIO, TCP, TCP-LISTEN, UDP, and UDP-LISTEN address types with fewer options for those address types.

What is the purpose of your question? When to use which? If so, the answer is: use netcat if it can solve your problem; use socat otherwise.

Solution 3:

Very (very, very) simply put, netcat is a telnet that you can use in scripts. Plus is can be used as a simple listener if you want. And yes socat can do more stuff than netcat, but to verify whether it is a superset, you need to compare command line options.