What's the fundamental difference between MFC and ATL?

Question

Assuming I am only using them for \"normal\" GUI programs (no COM, no ActiveX, nothing fancy), what is the fundamental difference I will see between ATL and

Answer 1

ATL is a set of classes meant to simplify the implementation of COM objects.

You can use it without MFC. At my job, we use ATL to expose COM interfaces to computational code. There is no GUI involved, it is for us to be able to call this computational code from eg. Excel VBA.

Look at some COM guide/tutorial to see what it abstracts.

MFC is just a set of GUI wrapper classes to the Win32 API. Look at some Win32 API tutorial to see what it abstracts.