User blog comment:Real Godisme/The Ultimate Wiki Markup Guide/@comment-6152051-20130602235416/@comment-1393830-20130602235722

They are in many ways the same tag. They can both do pretty much the same things, but span is a little more geared towards formatting text while div's main purpose is alignment. Also, with HTML5 being as stupid as it is, div align is not supported on newer websites, but ignore that as Wikia runs off of really old HTML