What is Apache Maven and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to Apache Maven
Jira
Jira's secret sauce is the way it simplifies the complexities of software development into manageable units of work. Jira comes out-of-the-box with everything agile teams need to ship value to customers faster. ...
Jenkins
In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project. ...
Gradle
Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites. ...
Apache Ant
Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make's wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code. ...
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations. ...
Eclipse
Standard Eclipse package suited for Java and plug-in development plus adding new plugins; already includes Git, Marketplace Client, source code and developer documentation. Click here to file a bug against Eclipse Platform. ...
CMake
It is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler independent configuration files, and generate native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of the user's choice. ...
Sonatype Nexus
It is an open source repository that supports many artifact formats, including Docker, Java™ and npm. With the Nexus tool integration, pipelines in your toolchain can publish and retrieve versioned apps and their dependencies ...
Apache Maven alternatives & related posts
Jira
- Powerful301
- Flexible253
- Easy separation of projects146
- Run in the cloud111
- Code integration104
- Easy to use56
- Run on your own50
- Easy Workflow Configuration37
- Great customization37
- REST API25
- Great Agile Management tool11
- Integrates with virtually everything6
- Confluence4
- Sentry Issues Integration2
- Complicated2
- Rather expensive5
- Large memory requirement3
related Jira posts
So I am a huge fan of JIRA like #massive I used it for many many years, and really loved it, used it personally and at work. I would suggest every new workplace that I worked at to switch to JIRA instead of what I was using.
When I started at #StackShare we were using a Trello #Kanban board and I was so shocked at how easy the workflow was to follow, create new tasks and get tasks QA'd and deployed. What was so great about this was it didn't come with all the complexity of JIRA. Like setting up a project, user rules etc. You are able to hit the ground running with Trello and get tasks started right away without being overwhelmed with the complexity of options in JIRA
With a few TrelloPowerUps we were easily able to add GitHub integration and storyPoints to our cards and thats all we needed to get a really nice agile workflow going.
I'm not saying that JIRA is not useful, I can see larger companies being able to use the JIRA features and have the time to go through all the complex setup to get a really good workflow going. But for smaller #Startups that want to hit the ground running Trello for me is the way to go.
In saying that what I would love Trello to implement is to allow me to create custom fields. Right now we just have a Description
field. So I am adding User Stories
& How To Test
in the Markdown of the Description
if I could have these as custom fields then my #Agile workflow would be complete.
#StackDecisionsLaunch
Last time we shared there information about our decision about using YouTrack over Jira actually we found much better solution that our team have loved. Linear is a minimalistic issue tracker that integrates well with Sentry, GitHub, Slack and Figma which are our basic tools. I would like to recommend checking out Linear as a potential alternative to "heavy" issue trackers, maybe at enterprises that may not work but when we're a startup that works awesome!
- Hosted internally520
- Free open source463
- Great to build, deploy or launch anything async313
- Tons of integrations243
- Rich set of plugins with good documentation208
- Has support for build pipelines108
- Open source and tons of integrations71
- Easy setup63
- It is open-source61
- Workflow plugin54
- Configuration as code11
- Very powerful tool10
- Many Plugins9
- Git and Maven integration is better8
- Great flexibility8
- Continuous Integration6
- Slack Integration (plugin)6
- Github integration6
- Easy customisation5
- Self-hosted GitLab Integration (plugin)5
- 100% free and open source4
- Docker support4
- Excellent docker integration3
- Fast builds3
- Platform idnependency3
- Pipeline API2
- Customizable2
- Can be run as a Docker container2
- It`w worked2
- Hosted Externally2
- AWS Integration2
- JOBDSL2
- It's Everywhere2
- NodeJS Support1
- PHP Support1
- Ruby/Rails Support1
- Universal controller1
- Easily extendable with seamless integration1
- Build PR Branch Only1
- Workarounds needed for basic requirements12
- Groovy with cumbersome syntax7
- Plugins compatibility issues6
- Limited abilities with declarative pipelines6
- Lack of support5
- No YAML syntax4
- Too tied to plugins versions2
related Jenkins posts
Releasing new versions of our services is done by Travis CI. Travis first runs our test suite. Once it passes, it publishes a new release binary to GitHub.
Common tasks such as installing dependencies for the Go project, or building a binary are automated using plain old Makefiles. (We know, crazy old school, right?) Our binaries are compressed using UPX.
Travis has come a long way over the past years. I used to prefer Jenkins in some cases since it was easier to debug broken builds. With the addition of the aptly named “debug build” button, Travis is now the clear winner. It’s easy to use and free for open source, with no need to maintain anything.
#ContinuousIntegration #CodeCollaborationVersionControl
















Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).
It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up
or vagrant reload
we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.
I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up
, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.
We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.
If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.
The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).
Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.
- Flexibility109
- Easy to use52
- Groovy dsl47
- Slow build time22
- Crazy memory leaks10
- Fast incremental builds7
- Kotlin DSL4
- Windows Support1
- Inactionnable documentation6
- It is just the mess of Ant++5
- Hard to decide: ten or more ways to achieve one goal4
- Bad Eclipse tooling2
- Dependency on groovy2
related Gradle posts
We use Apache Maven because it is a standard. Gradle is very good alternative, but Gradle doesn't provide any advantage for our project. Gradle is slower (without running daemon), need more resources and a learning curve is quite big. Our project can not use a great flexibility of Gradle. On the other hand, Maven is well-know tool integrated in many IDEs, Dockers and so on.






























Java JavaScript Node.js nginx Ubuntu MongoDB Amazon EC2 Redis Amazon S3 AWS Lambda RabbitMQ Kafka MySQL Spring Boot Dropwizard Vue.js Flutter
UtilitiesGoogle Analytics Elasticsearch Amazon Route 53
DevOpsGitHub Docker Webpack CircleCI Jenkins Travis CI Gradle Apache Maven
Cooperation ToolsJira notion.so Trello
- Flexible4
- Simple1
- Easy to learn1
- Easy to write own java-build-hooks1
- Slow1
- Old and not widely used anymore1
related Apache Ant posts
All Java-Projects are compiled using Apache Maven. We prefer it over Apache Ant and Gradle as it combines lightweightness with feature-richness and offers basically all we can imagine from a software project-management tool and more. We're open however to re-evaluate this decision in favor of Gradle or Bazel in the future if we feel like we're missing out on anything.
Apache Tomcat
- Easy79
- Java72
- Popular48
- Spring web1
related Apache Tomcat posts








I need some advice to choose an engine for generation web pages from the Spring Boot app. Which technology is the best solution today? 1) JSP + JSTL 2) Apache FreeMarker 3) Thymeleaf Or you can suggest even other perspective tools. I am using Spring Boot, Spring Web, Spring Data, Spring Security, PostgreSQL, Apache Tomcat in my project. I have already tried to generate pages using jsp, jstl, and it went well. However, I had huge problems via carrying already created static pages, to jsp format, because of syntax. Thanks.
- Does it all130
- Integrates with most of tools74
- Easy to use62
- Java IDE60
- Best Java IDE30
- Open source8
- Hard for newbews2
- Great gdb integration2
- Lightweight1
- Great code suggestions1
- Professional1
- Good Git client allowing direct stage area edit1
- True open source with huge contribution1
- Extensible1
- Works with php0
- 2000 Design8
- Bad performance6
- Hard to use2
related Eclipse posts
UPDATE: Thanks for the great response. I am going to start with VSCode based on the open source and free version that will allow me to grow into other languages, but not cost me a license ..yet.
I have been working with software development for 12 years, but I am just beginning my journey to learn to code. I am starting with Python following the suggestion of some of my coworkers. They are split between Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA for IDEs that they use and PyCharm is new to me. Which IDE would you suggest for a beginner that will allow expansion to Java, JavaScript, and eventually AngularJS and possibly mobile applications?
Have been a Visual Studio Code user since just after launch to the general public, having used the likes of Eclipse and Atom previously. Was amazed how mature it seemed off the bat and was super intrigued by the bootstrapped nature of it having been written/based on Electron/TypeScript, and of course being an open-source app from Microsoft. The features, plugin ecosystem and release frequency are very impressive. I do dev work on both Mac and Windows and don't use anything else now as far as IDEs go.
- Has package registry1
related CMake posts
related Sonatype Nexus posts
We use Sonatype Nexus to store our closed-source java libraries to simplify our deployment and dependency-management. While there are many alternatives, most of them are expensive ( GitLab Enterprise ), monilithic ( JFrog Artifactory ) or only offer SaaS-licences. We preferred the on-premise approach of Nexus and therefore decided to use it.
We exclusively use the Maven-capabilities and are glad that the modular design of Nexus allows us to run it very lightweight.
I'm beginning to research the right way to better integrate how we achieve SCA / shift-left / SecureDevOps / secure software supply chain. If you use or have evaluated WhiteSource, Snyk, Sonatype Nexus, SonarQube or similar, I would very much appreciate your perspective on strengths and weaknesses and how you selected your ultimate solution. I want to integrate with GitLab CI.