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. Pants vs Please

Pants vs Please

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Pants
Pants
Stacks23
Followers86
Votes30
GitHub Stars3.7K
Forks674
Please
Please
Stacks13
Followers14
Votes4
GitHub Stars2.6K
Forks210

Pants vs Please: What are the differences?

<Markdown code for website>

Introduction:
Pants and Please are popular build tools used in software development. While they both serve the purpose of building software projects, there are key differences between the two that developers should be aware of.

1. **Language Support**: Pants is written in Python and primarily used for Python projects, while Please is written in Go and supports a wider range of languages including Python, Java, C++, and more.
2. **Build Configuration**: Pants uses BUILD files in a monorepo style setup, where all build targets are defined in one place, while Please uses a single BUILD.please file for each package/module, providing a more modular approach to build configuration.
3. **Bazel Integration**: Please was developed as an alternative to Bazel rules and integrates seamlessly with Bazel, allowing developers to leverage Bazel's scalability and performance benefits, whereas Pants focuses more on standalone usage without direct Bazel integration.
4. **Community Support**: Pants has a well-established community with active contributors and a history of steady development, while Please, being a newer tool, is gaining popularity and growing its community support rapidly.
5. **Testing Support**: Pants provides built-in support for multiple testing frameworks like Pytest and coverage tools, while Please offers more flexibility in integrating custom testing setups and frameworks based on project requirements.

In Summary, Pants and Please differ in language support, build configuration, Bazel integration, community support, and testing support, making each tool suitable for different project and development needs.

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

Pants
Pants
Please
Please

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

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.

Builds Java, Scala, and Python.;Adding support for new languages is straightforward.;Supports code generation: thrift, protocol buffers, custom code generators.;Resolves external JVM and Python dependencies.;Runs tests.;Spawns Python and Scala REPLs with appropriate load paths.;Creates deployable packages.;Scales to large repos with many interdependent modules.;Designed for incremental builds.;Support for local and distributed caching.;Especially fast for Scala builds, compared to alternatives.;Builds standalone python executables (PEX files);Has a plugin system to add custom features and override stock behavior.;Runs on Linux and Mac OS X.
Build files; Build targets; Build labels
Statistics
GitHub Stars
3.7K
GitHub Stars
2.6K
GitHub Forks
674
GitHub Forks
210
Stacks
23
Stacks
13
Followers
86
Followers
14
Votes
30
Votes
4
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 6
    Creates deployable packages
  • 4
    Scales
  • 4
    Runs on Linux
  • 4
    Runs on OS X
  • 4
    BUILD files
Pros
  • 1
    No single WORKSPACE file that nobody owns or understand
  • 1
    Built-in languages are defined in the same language
  • 1
    Multi-language
  • 1
    IntelliJ support
Cons
  • 1
    No Windows support
Integrations
No integrations available
Python
Python
Java
Java
C++
C++
Golang
Golang

What are some alternatives to Pants, Please?

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.

Bazel

Bazel

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.

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.

Apache Ant

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.

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