--- title: GNU Make Reviews meta_title: 'GNU Make Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 19 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how GNU Make works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 19 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-05-05' parent_category: name: CI/CD Tools url: https://www.g2.com/categories/ci-cd-tools --- # GNU Make Reviews **Vendor:** FreeCAD **Category:** [Other Continuous Delivery Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/other-continuous-delivery) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 19 ## About GNU Make Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files. ## GNU Make Reviews ### 1. GNU Make Review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David O. | Cloud Architect - Digital Transformation, Infrastructure/Platforms Migration, Systems Integration, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 23, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** It's one of the best tools in compiling open source software for security hardening and custom configuration. We use it for building large binaries or libraries. It easy to update any source file, and any dependent files are regenerated with minimal effort. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** You need to be an advanced or intermediate Linux/Unix user to be able to troubleshoot compilation issues. Installing GNU Make for the first time might be tricky depending on your Linux distribution if it doesn't have the necessary libraries or if you're trying to use a particular GNU Make version and you need to resolve dependencies. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** If you're considering using open source software or want to compile software from original sources for custom configuration or security hardening, you will most likely need to use GNU Make. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use GNU Make to create custom Nginx configuration and security-harden our systems. We also use it to compile the latest releases of OpenSSL directly for the source. ### 2. Make, frustrating but powerful **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrew C. | Digital Signal Processing Engineer, Defense & Space, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 17, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** Make and its associated configuration files offer mature build scripting. Newer tools are less confusing and have a gentler learning curve but they don't match the level of support make has. It's been around forever and is thus easy to find support. Make allows powerful build configuration and integrates well into third-party programs such as auto tools and CMake. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** Makefiles can get insanely complicated. For large projects, I need to use tools like CMake to handle the generation of Makefiles because of the complexity. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** Take the time to learn Make. It is difficult at first but truly knowing the tool is very powerful and will save many headaches down the road. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have to distribute our development programs throughout our company for others to use. We don't have the time to stick them in containers when we are quickly iterating. Make allows us to write build scripts that have powerful configuration options so that others can build the development programs locally. ### 3. Make, the old comprehensive way **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 22, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** I have used CMake, make, and IDE's inbuilt make programs, but nothing has offered a more comprehensive way to make and build my .c and .c++ files as well as GNU Make does. The IDEs are less confusing and seem like they're organized, but they can only offer a limited number of options that barely touch the surface. With Make I can organize the code myself in a customized directory structure and determine the Make sequence myself. Also, the community of experts on Make is so huge that all you need is a google search for answers to most questions. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** Make offers a huge level of customization, but it gets really complicated when you combine files of different types under the same project. You may have to resort to using CMake or IDEs for such cases. Make is years behind on handling large amount of files. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** GNU Make handles projects with a smaller number of files or code and by giving you a better level of customization and better code structure. The makefile really helps organize the code for users unfamiliar with your code. If you have a bigger project though, I'd recommend using CMake or an IDE. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** Making and building scripts, handling projects with multiples files of code etc. I've realized that it really helps package all my code into a single makefile that can be used by people who are unfamiliar with my code. ### 4. makefiles **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Victor M. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 26, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** The more generic Makefiles, the better. They can be easily reused and once one has a panoply of files for various circumstances, it is only a matter of copying them to the corresponding directory. Although primitive, the Makefiles have had a great journey and will continue to have it. And learning a few basic tricks will save you typing a lot with what you can devote to what you really like, which is typing a lot. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** In the beginning it is a little complicated to understand its operation but it is possible to find good documentation in the network **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** the processing of files in automated tasks ### 5. Hard to setup, but the price can't be beat! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** James M. | Co-Founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** MAKE is the standard for compiling programs. Personally I prefer it for programming embedded systems over more expensive options like uvision as it's flexible, free, and cross platform. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** Going from another complier to Make can be a hassle. Always requires setup to get working. Lack of dedicated support beyond forms makes it hard to troubleshoot at times **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** The ability to compile and run programs/firmware across different platforms (Mac, linux, windows). We no longer need to duel boot windows on our machines to compile programs. ### 6. Write a code in simple steps **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mukesh R. | Software Engineer Quality, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** It's very easy to write code using this tool. All you need to do is convert your code to makefile and tool will handle pretty much rest. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** conversion step sometime could be troublesome and copying over code does lead security concern. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** I would highly recommend anyone considering tool to build or write code for any in house products. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building in house tool for validation and verification. Automate some simple scenario to improve quality in timely manner. ### 7. Traditional software building tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pedro Andrés B. | Software Engineer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** It allows me to define the building instructions of my software **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** It is still command-line based. It would be nice to have a graphical Makefile editor. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** I can now build my software with a single command ### 8. Make, a powerful tool to have **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 26, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** The fact that you can automate the compilation of your project (the most basic function of make) is a life saver, organising all the dependencies of a project. It can basically solve of your build configuration needs. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** The learning curve might be steep, and the manual, while trustworthy and complete, it's long and maybe not in the best format. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** Invest time in learning how to use make. Don't just rush in and use code you find, it will be quite useful to know how to use it. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use GNU make to manage our servers configuration and our project's compilations. It's pretty much part of an standard toolkit. ### 9. Make... love it, hate it, but use it **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** JR R. | Co-Founder/CTO, Computer Networking, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** I always works as advertised, and there is a tremendous amount of community knowledge about its characteristics and idiosyncrasies. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** Makefiles can get very verbose. In addition debugging both failures to build as well as "over building" can get very hairy. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** Make is typically used to build software efficiently; however, we've been able to use it for building/refreshing documentation and even project plans based on well defined dependencies. ### 10. Universal build system **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 29, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** Make is old, granted, but that gives it an unequalled portability. Also, it is more difficult to use than the tools specialized for an ecosystem (e.g., go build for go), but that makes it a great tool for the projects mixing different environments (C++ with Python etc.). **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** I would like it to be able to run in daemon mode and watch the files in a given run, and recompile when I save. I would like not to have to run it each time, it should just read the filesystem notifications. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** Don't limit yourselves to the default POSIX Make, it lacks way too many features. Expect and require GNU Make: there is no time to waste with limited products. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use it to build my projects, package them, publish them, publish the documentation, etc. It's the cornerstone of my mechanization of all the tasks I have to do. ### 11. Works well. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nexus W. | Web Developer, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** GNU make works well and gets the job done. It is also free and Open source. What more can you ask for? **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** Limited support for “if” conditionals. (Conditional statements are especially important in cross-platform makefiles.) **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automating software builds more easily because of standardized syntax. We us GNU make for C programs, as well as for applications written in other languages. ### 12. Powerful and Universal **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 19, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** Free and open source with decades worth of community support. From defining dependencies to rebuilding projects, make makes it easy. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** Documentation is cumbersome and advanced features are plentiful, making it even more of a pain to optimize and efficiently use make. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** Research online for tutorials and simple make scenarios. Also, man make. =) **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use make to automate rebuilds of modules in production systems and roll them out seamlessly. Also utilize it for static website building using M4 for our internal documentation systems. ### 13. Somewhat complex but rewarding tool. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 22, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** Without a doubt the best thing about GNU Make is the ability to update any source file and the dependent files are regenerated with practically any effort. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** Although it is an amazing tool, it can get slightly complex to use it to its full potential. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** When you achieve some mastery with GNU Make it is really a time saver. The main benefits are how it convenient to write batch scripts for a variety of tasks and save time for automated tasks. ### 14. Build packages without worrying about dependcies **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** This makes software development relatively easy. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** Sometimes too much scripting is required compared to C Make. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** This product is not just for software development. You can also use this for building and installing packages. And, it's free. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use this for project development purposes. I like that GNU Make has multi-language support. ### 15. Automating large programming projects **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 24, 2018 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** Ability to recompile any language that runs in a shell. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** No support for non shell languages, which would be nice to have. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** Determine if there is a gap in current tool set and if GNU Make would fill that gap. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** Speeding up code deployments and change process of large programs. ### 16. Common/portable system to build projects. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Defense & Space | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 30, 2017 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** The tool is free and open source. There is plenty of free tutorials online to help with troubleshooting. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** With a big project, things get complex very quickly. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** Once it's setup, it's very easy to use, sometimes it just takes some effort to get to that point on a larger project. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managing the build process. ### 17. A very useful tool for compilation and task automation. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Miguel Angel A. | Instructor Professor, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** The best thing about GNU Make is how it integrates with the user's installed shell commands and applications. This makes it great to write batch processing scripts for all sort of tasks, beyond just compilation automation. It also makes automatic timestamp checking of produced files so that it doesn't have to repeat steps unnecessarily. It also has support for parallel execution of tasks. Also, it's command language is simpler than Microsoft's BAT and other shell script formats, a plus for writing scripts manually. Since GNU Make (and UNIX make tool by extension) are old and time-tested tools there is also lot's of support for it, with things like libtool, automake and Cmake helping with the generation of makefiles for complex compilation workflows. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** It's an integral part of the UNIX compilation workflow so using it outside of UNIX systems (namely Windows) is complicated. There are alternatives like Mingw32-make and Cygwin that attempt to solve this problem, however. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** Take some time to practice it a bit if you want to use it manually. Also I recommend learning make before learning other related tools like CMake or the autoconf, automake, libtool combo. Even if you don't ever write a line of a Makefile yourself it pays to know how to read one for debugging purposes. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use GNU Make personally to automate all sort of processes that produce intermediate files. Almost all my C/C++ projects use GNU Make (unless the size of the project is so small that adding Make becomes unnecessary). I also use GNU Make to automate LaTeX compilations when writing technical reports and whitepapers. I have even used it to compile Java projects using the LeJOS libraries for the LEGO Mindstorms robots since GNU Make is WAY easier to setup and use than Ant. ### 18. Simple Automation TOol **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 23, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** I can easily describe the dependencies of my project, and then Make will automatically rebuild any that have changed dependencies – it makes partial builds extremely simple. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** Some of the advanced features are difficult to use, and the documentation is often hard to navigate through. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** Definitely give it a try as it is very simple to do, and significantly improves build times. In addition, using an automated build tool to manage partial builds is very helpful – you can detect build errors early rather than later on. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was trying to solve the issue of having to manually manage my own building of my source code. Using Make, however, allowed me to more easily solve this problem. ### 19. I use daily the make tool to compile programs **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rodrigo P. | Evangelista, Banking, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 14, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Make?** Make is a very simple tool with a lot of functions. **What do you dislike about GNU Make?** The documentation for the tool is very antique. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Make:** Make is a great tool to work with shell script and c language. **What problems is GNU Make solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use the tool to compile programas, so I use to resolve all the problems in my work. - [View GNU Make pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/gnu-make/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-26+15%3A35%3A08+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=4ce7ff7e-f5c0-461c-a2b8-46678f2a49ae&secure%5Btoken%5D=e291630aa4b9ad4fc506a459439ebb7396e94fbe7fbef02cf5ba28d9831cff4d&format=llm_user) ## Top GNU Make Alternatives - [CMake](https://www.g2.com/products/cmake/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (17 reviews) - [SCons](https://www.g2.com/products/scons/reviews) - 4.1/5.0 (17 reviews) - [Leiningen](https://www.g2.com/products/leiningen/reviews) - 4.8/5.0 (3 reviews)