StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. Java Build Tools
  5. Apache Ant vs Bazel

Apache Ant vs Bazel

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Apache Ant
Apache Ant
Stacks250
Followers151
Votes7
GitHub Stars449
Forks449
Bazel
Bazel
Stacks314
Followers579
Votes133

Apache Ant vs Bazel: What are the differences?

# Introduction
Apache Ant and Bazel are both build tools used in software development. They have distinct features that set them apart from each other.

1. **Language and Configuration**: Apache Ant uses XML-based scripts for build files, while Bazel uses a domain-specific language that resembles Python for BUILD files, making Bazel easier to read and maintain for developers.
2. **Parallelism**: Bazel is designed to maximize parallelism by splitting the build process into fine-grained tasks, allowing for faster builds compared to Apache Ant, which does not leverage parallelism as efficiently.
3. **Dependency Resolution**: Bazel has a sophisticated dependency resolution system that enables it to build only the necessary targets, reducing build times significantly. On the other hand, Apache Ant rebuilds all the targets defined in the build file each time, leading to longer build times.
4. **Caching and Incremental Builds**: Bazel has built-in support for caching and incremental builds, allowing it to reuse previous build outputs and only reconstruct the necessary parts of the build graph. This results in faster build times compared to Apache Ant, which lacks robust caching mechanisms.
5. **Scalability**: Bazel is designed for scalability and can efficiently handle large codebases and complex dependency graphs. Apache Ant, while suitable for smaller projects, may struggle to manage the build process in large-scale projects due to its limitations in handling dependencies and parallelism.
6. **Community and Ecosystem**: Bazel has a strong community support and is widely used in larger organizations like Google, ensuring ongoing development and support. Apache Ant, while still in use, may not have the same level of community support and resources available for developers.

In Summary, Apache Ant and Bazel differ in their language, parallelism, dependency resolution, caching capabilities, scalability, and community support, making them suitable for different types of projects and teams.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Apache Ant
Apache Ant
Bazel
Bazel

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.

Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.

The most complete Java build and deployment tool available.;Platform neutral and can handle platform specific properties such as file separators;Can be used to perform platform specific tasks such as modifying the modified time of a file using 'touch' command;Scripts are written using plain XML. If you are already familiar with XML, you can learn pretty quickly;Automate complicated repetitive tasks;Interface to develop custom tasks;Can be easily invoked from the command line and it can integrate with free and commercial IDEs
Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages;High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations;Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones;Reproducibility: In BUILD files, each library, test, and binary must specify its direct dependencies completely. Bazel uses this dependency information to know what must be rebuilt when you make changes to a source file, and which tasks can run in parallel. This means that all builds are incremental and will always produce the same result;Scalable: Bazel can handle large builds
Statistics
GitHub Stars
449
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
449
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
250
Stacks
314
Followers
151
Followers
579
Votes
7
Votes
133
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 4
    Flexible
  • 1
    Easy to write own java-build-hooks
  • 1
    Simple
  • 1
    Easy to learn
Cons
  • 1
    Old and not widely used anymore
  • 1
    Slow
Pros
  • 28
    Fast
  • 20
    Deterministic incremental builds
  • 17
    Correct
  • 16
    Multi-language
  • 14
    Enforces declared inputs/outputs
Cons
  • 3
    No Windows Support
  • 2
    Bad IntelliJ support
  • 1
    Lack of Documentation
  • 1
    Learning Curve
  • 1
    Constant breaking changes
Integrations
No integrations available
Java
Java
Objective-C
Objective-C
C++
C++

What are some alternatives to Apache Ant, Bazel?

Apache Maven

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

Gradle

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.

Pants

Pants

Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

JitPack

JitPack

JitPack is an easy to use package repository for Gradle/Sbt and Maven projects. We build GitHub projects on demand and provides ready-to-use packages.

SBT

SBT

It is similar to Java's Maven and Ant. Its main features are: Native support for compiling Scala code and integrating with many Scala test frameworks.

Buck

Buck

Buck encourages the creation of small, reusable modules consisting of code and resources, and supports a variety of languages on many platforms.

Please

Please

Please is a cross-language build system with an emphasis on high performance, extensibility and reproduceability. It supports a number of popular languages and can automate nearly any aspect of your build process.

CMake

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

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

JFrog Artifactory

JFrog Artifactory

It integrates with your existing ecosystem supporting end-to-end binary management that overcomes the complexity of working with different software package management systems, and provides consistency to your CI/CD workflow.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana