Deployer vs phing: What are the differences?

Developers describe Deployer as "Deployment Tool for PHP". A deployment tool written in PHP with support for popular frameworks out of the box. On the other hand, phing is detailed as "A PHP project build system or build tool based on ​Apache Ant". It is not GNU make; it's a PHP project build system or build tool based on Apache Ant. You can do anything with it that you could do with a traditional build system like GNU make, and its use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP 'task' classes make it an easy-to-use and highly flexible build framework.

Deployer can be classified as a tool in the "Continuous Deployment" category, while phing is grouped under "Package Managers".

Some of the features offered by Deployer are:

• Simple setup process and a minimal learning curve
• Ready to use recipes for most frameworks
• Parallel execution without extensions

On the other hand, phing provides the following key features:

• Simple XML buildfiles
• Rich set of provided tasks
• Easily extendable via PHP classes

Deployer and phing are both open source tools. It seems that Deployer with 7.01K GitHub stars and 997 forks on GitHub has more adoption than phing with 995 GitHub stars and 299 GitHub forks.