What are the Publishing featues in SharePoint 2013?

By default, when you start using SharePoint Online or SharePoint on-premises, any site collection, either default or the one you created, does not have publishing features enabled.

By default, all the site collections are set up for collaboration-type sites. That means you can create team sites, department sites, wikis, add document libraries, calendars, all the other available web parts, save sites as templates and so on. You can build a completely functional Intranet in SharePoint using the available functionality.

Then there are the publishing features. They allow for enhanced management and presentation of content in SharePoint, especially when it comes to custom branding, themes, and extensive navigation options. Moreover, some advanced web parts like Content Query Web Part (CQWP) and Content Search Web Part (CSWP) require publishing features to be enabled.