How is WAR different from Win Shares?

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Green retro manual baseball scoreboard beyond an empty, neatly mowed baseball field with brown infield dirt and striped grass outfield. — Sabermetrics A scoreboard provides some – but not necessarily the most useful – data on player and team performances in baseball.

In the context of sabermetrics, both Win Shares and Wins Above Replacement (WAR) are methods designed to summarize a player's total contribution to their team in a single value, but they rely on different conceptual foundations.1

Win Shares: Developed by Bill James, this method assigns a single number to every player in major-league history for each season, accounting for their contributions as a hitter, fielder, base runner, or pitcher.1
Wins Above Replacement (WAR): This metric is predicated on the value of a theoretical "replacement player"—someone readily available from a team's bench or farm system.1

While Win Shares provides a comprehensive accounting of a player's performance, WAR specifically measures how much more value a player provides compared to a baseline replacement-level player. Over time, WAR has evolved into a highly sophisticated metric with various versions propagated across different platforms, succeeding earlier methods like James's Win Shares and Pete Palmer's Total Player Rating.1