WAMP and XAMPP are both development environments that allow for building and testing PHP and MySQL applications on Windows systems. WAMP focuses only on Apache, MySQL, and PHP, while XAMPP can be used on multiple operating systems and includes additional components like Perl. XAMPP has a more full-featured control panel and allows adding other services, but requires more system resources. WAMP configuration is easier but does not include SSL support like XAMPP. For basic web applications, WAMP may be sufficient, but XAMPP provides more advanced options and flexibility. The two cannot run simultaneously due to port conflicts.