Although both of them are command-line consoles of the Windows system, and they have a similar outlook and Powershell can be treated as an updated version of CMD, the intrinsic design model of them is different.

Powershell is based on Microsoft .NET architect and re-designs the shell command. The biggest difference is that PowerShell is built on the basis of the .Net framework common language runtime (CLR) and .Net framework, which accepts and returns .Net framework objects. In other words, PowerShell’s pipe passes a .Net object instead of a raw string. That brings compatibility and convenience for Powershell.

Below I list some points of the difference.

• object-oriented: Powershell support OOP.
• compatibility: based on .NET framework, be compatible with other Windows platform applications, such as executable (.exe), batch bat, and VB script.
• good programming experience: can use .NET library, syntax is very similar to advanced programming languages.
• scalability: Powershell has become a platform. In addition to Microsoft, Amazon’s cloud platform management and Dell’s out-of-hand management also provide PowerShell-based management components. PowerShell has become a standard, a specification.

All of the above advantages that CMD doesn’t have. If you are familiar with .NET, you can use Powershell to do anything that .NET does.