HISAT2 and STAR both are used for aligning our reads to reference genome. But I do not know what the actual difference between them is. When and why should I use either of them?
Generally, they are equivalent. They both are designed to handle spliced reads (e.g. RNA-seq) well.
HISAT2 may be better if you are on a memory-limited machine. STAR is designed to use large amounts of RAM for quick and efficient alignments. STAR has a lot of functionality and maybe is more easily customizable (in my opinion the STAR manual is more comprehensive, but I haven't looked at HISAT2 in a while.).
If you are working on a genome other than Mouse or Human, I find HISAT2 to be easier to use "out of the box." For example, with STAR the indexing process usually needs parameter adjustment for smaller genomes.
Depending on your use case, I wouldn't worry too much about the differences if you're just doing general analysis, like alignment and quantification of counts over protein coding genes.
If you are trying to perform more customized, specific, complex, or sensitive analysis, then maybe the differences and tunable parameters might matter more.
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