WordPress has three different post statuses:
It also has three different visibility options:
When you set a post to Published and Private, WordPress will display its status as Privately Published.
Are there any differences between a post status of Draft vs. Privately Published? They seem to behave very similarly.
It may be a little bit confusing, but there are significant differences:
publish_posts capability to publish
I'm a bit late to the party ;), but I just found out that in my theme, there is a difference between a draft and a private post. A draft can be seen in the searchresults when you would search for the post title. When clicking on it, it shows a 404 page. By setting it to private, the draft doesn't show up in the searchresults.
I don't know if this is a wordpress thing, or just my theme. Personally I find it a bit stupid. To me a draft should always be private. That's what a draft is, right?
So, it might be different per theme, but it is possible that both options have a different outcome :).
Draft posts (and Pending Review posts) do have permalinks a.k.a. URLs. The URL is automatically generated the first time you save the post as a Draft or Pending Review. Considering that, I can't tell any real difference between Draft/Pending and Privately Published posts/pages, other than the folders in which they're saved.
In addition to the technical answers that other users have provided, here are the brief canonical descriptions of each default post status given by WordPress's Gutenberg editor:
