Last updated: Nov 01, 2026
GNU make works well and gets the job done. It is also free and Open source. What more can you ask for? Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Limited support for “if” conditionals. (Conditional statements are especially important in cross-platform makefiles.) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Free and open source with decades worth of community support. From defining dependencies to rebuilding projects, make makes it easy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Documentation is cumbersome and advanced features are plentiful, making it even more of a pain to optimize and efficiently use make. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Although it is an amazing tool, it can get slightly complex to use it to its full potential. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
This makes software development relatively easy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Sometimes too much scripting is required compared to C Make. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Ability to recompile any language that runs in a shell. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
No support for non shell languages, which would be nice to have. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The tool is free and open source.
There is plenty of free tutorials online to help with troubleshooting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
With a big project, things get complex very quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Some of the advanced features are difficult to use, and the documentation is often hard to navigate through. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Make is a very simple tool with a lot of functions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The documentation for the tool is very antique. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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