--- title: SCons Reviews meta_title: 'SCons Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 17 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how SCons works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.1 review_count: 17 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-05-05' parent_category: name: CI/CD Tools url: https://www.g2.com/categories/ci-cd-tools --- # SCons Reviews **Vendor:** SCons Foundation **Category:** [Other Continuous Delivery Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/other-continuous-delivery) **Average Rating:** 4.1/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 17 ## About SCons SCons is an Open Source software construction tool-that is, a next-generation build tool. ## SCons Reviews ### 1. SCons Review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Food & Beverages | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2020 **What do you like best about SCons?** Its so much simpler to use than GNU Make or CMake. Because its Python, it can be broadly adopted and supported by most software engineers. **What do you dislike about SCons?** The trade-off of its simplicity is that you must refer to the documentation for weird edge cases. Because the documentation is very good, this is seldom an issue. **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building C/C++ software. I love it is Python code which is ubiquitous. Also, running signatures on files ensures change detection and rebuild. Automatic header file dependency tracking is extra work I don't have to do compared to Make. ### 2. Time saver on products developed for automotive! Easy to configure and readable! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bianca I. | Software Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 11, 2020 **What do you like best about SCons?** SCons is a very versatile package. Using SCons we're able to configure our environment on different levels easily. Almost everything is straight-forward and easy to use. Plus, many people are using it which means potential blocking points are easily passed. **What do you dislike about SCons?** I'd like to have a deeper understanding of the implementation of the package, hence a more detailed documentation will come in handy. I'd like to have a deeper look into what other uses this package could have. **Recommendations to others considering SCons:** I recommend using this package because it's really useful and a time saver. Also, it is easy to read and configure, from my point of view. **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm using SCons for building and testing projects developed for automotive industry, mostly written in C. Building means compiling and linking the code. Prebuild and postbuild actions are configured in SCons, too. Also, SCons is used for automated builds in Jenkins. ### 3. quick and slow **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Oleg L. | Solutions Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2021 **What do you like best about SCons?** The simplicity of use. Quick onboarding. **What do you dislike about SCons?** Slow speed of builds. Garbage files when building solution **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building pet projects. Quickstart for any project. Easy to learn how to build c++ binaries and libs my analyzing command line output. ### 4. Worked with scons for about 5 years to build cross-platform C++ code for Windows and Linux. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ashish P. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 03, 2020 **What do you like best about SCons?** Scons uses OO python because of which it's very easy to create new target build scripts with the provided API. It is also very extendable and can fine tuned for particular use as well if default is not sufficient. **What do you dislike about SCons?** The dependency graph generated is not that good for a large project which can lead to long compilation times. **Recommendations to others considering SCons:** It is an efficient and easy to use system with a very powerful programming interface in OO Python. For cross platform build environment SCons is well suited and can be integrated with CI/CD systems easily. However, one might need to tweak the dependency graph features for a large code base. **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** The problem to solve was create an efficient build system that was easy to use and extend for a large cross platform code base. The benefits are easy OO API that is very customizable and provides parallelism features. ### 5. The right design/architecture for a builder **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Albert G. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2020 **What do you like best about SCons?** It's design / architecture has the right concepts of a (generic) builder: Target, Dependencies, Nodes, Toolset, Builder, Scanner, Environments, Configure Checks.. and it does it as a Python module, the right language for the task. That means that any task that you will need to do building your project has already a good concept to represent it and most probably already an implementation of it that does it, and also that you don't need to know any new language/syntax, but just an API/Module of a well-known language that is cross-platform by nature. **What do you dislike about SCons?** Unfortunately, its community was not as big as its competitors (mainly CMake) and it felt like I was using a much better technology than most of the projects, but that it won't last because for some reason it's not properly known in the industry. **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** I've used Scons for the whole building + testing of C/C++ projects. To create the libs and apps, but also the documentation, and even autogenerate, build and run tests. It helped me a lot to have a single command to run any of those tasks and to do it on Linux, Windows and even for Embedded devices. It was also fun to create some custom implementation of it's main concepts. ### 6. Powerful but quirky **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tasos P. | Systens Engineer, Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 23, 2020 **What do you like best about SCons?** Scons is a build system written in Python, and build scripts are written in Python. This is a good thing as it gives you the debugging flexibility tou can’t find in other build systems. Anybody can use Python so anybody can maintain a Scons build system, in principle. Scons is amazingly powerful, but it allows you to diverge a lot from its intended use. If you don’t do things the Scons way, you will soon run into trouble. It is also good in maintaining a correct build, if you use it right. It is easy to create custom commands to automate common tasks. Again, Python is the real power here. **What do you dislike about SCons?** Scons is very slow. Some vague concepts . **Recommendations to others considering SCons:** You might check out other simpler build systems like Fastbuild. Scons is a real automation powerhouse. For simple builds, easier frameworks will work fine. **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy to set up a build system quickly and debuggability. ### 7. A simple, very portable build system **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vadim T. | Senior Software Engineer, Quartz, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 22, 2020 **What do you like best about SCons?** I'd like portability as this build system will work anywhere for you where you can run python interpreter. No other dependency involved except of course you build chain. **What do you dislike about SCons?** Some errors are about python but they really about wrong use of Scons API. **Recommendations to others considering SCons:** If you need something that will build your project for any platform which supports python **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used scons to cross compile android and IOS native library for Android and iPhone mobile apps. ### 8. Scons for efficiently building C/C++ **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2021 **What do you like best about SCons?** Its documentation and the fact that it is written in Python **What do you dislike about SCons?** Logging can be made more elaborate. Would help the first time implementers. **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** Trying to build faster by making use of the multithreading capacity in scons. The switch has made us achieve CI/CD in our environment in nearly half the time than before. ### 9. Scons rockz **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 29, 2020 **What do you like best about SCons?** I have used scons in one of my project...very easy to use and write your own build system if u are aware of python....very easy and handy tool **What do you dislike about SCons?** Nothing as such....i have found it very easy to use. **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** The best thing is the ease of use.....i highly recommend it ### 10. Scon's the best build system I know **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 30, 2020 **What do you like best about SCons?** It's well thoughtful design, I can debug build script. It utilizes multi core machines easily. **What do you dislike about SCons?** It's complex, for new users. I didn't find templates for most use cases like in Cmake. It requires some work for even simple project, but the code written well will bring fruits in future. **Recommendations to others considering SCons:** It's the best build system for new complex project's if you bear in mind the future of product's evolution (add/remove new features, build targets etc) **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** In big project, we changed switch on/off software's feature from #defines in c++ to scons. It's easy to customize build and adapt to particular version of hardware. ### 11. Definitely recomended for Linux build systems **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Himanshu P. | Engineering Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2020 **What do you like best about SCons?** scons can be customized using Python. So you get all the power of python with you while having scons **What do you dislike about SCons?** Poor examples of scons with different types of scenarios **Recommendations to others considering SCons:** If you have developers working for your build system, scons is worth considering **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** We migrated from make build system to scons because we wanted to write custom logic which we could do in Python. Also any developer who knows python can work on it ### 12. Easy and fast build system **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Printing | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2020 **What do you like best about SCons?** can be written in python Has cache mechanism. Easily can extent to new source files. **What do you dislike about SCons?** Cannot do parallel builds using many build machines. **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use for building thousands of source files with cache. ### 13. Smaller footprint, more reliable builds **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Eric T. | Software Engineer, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2019 **What do you like best about SCons?** Scons was great for several reasons, especially for large low-level systems components. It was easy to map makefiles to Scons build files. Coming from a recursive make design it resulted in significantly more consistent code builds. The footprint of the build code was shrunk by over 80% and it would build faster. The biggest gain was dependencies were properly discovered which meant it built once instead of several times, as it had before. **What do you dislike about SCons?** Some difficulties were encountered when trying to build projects where there weren't builders already defined, so extending Scons can be a pain. **Recommendations to others considering SCons:** It's great for system level software and can build large projects reliably. Ensure you have the right libraries and compilers on your system and it can handle most of the rest of the process. **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** The major problem Scons solved for us was moving away from a monolithic build. This allowed us to build in Docker containers and focus on the components that had changed, instead of the whole system. That gain allowed for our team to use a continuous integration server which was difficult when built as a monolith. ### 14. SCons is the build tool of choice for enterprise applications **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vipul S. | Software Developer, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 01, 2019 **What do you like best about SCons?** SCons is python based and is easy to extend by adding custom builders and generators. It gives fine grained control over the build logic where one can explicitly define build targets, their sources and series of steps to follow in order to build those targets. **What do you dislike about SCons?** SCons can sometimes lead to circular dependencies errors, if the code is not programmed logically. **Recommendations to others considering SCons:** If you have a complex and interdependent python based code with multiple targets, sources and libraries, SCons should be the build tool you should be going for. **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** SCons is used in my project to compile and build an enterprise level Linux based secure OS. It has greatly enhanced dependency resolution among various components in the code. It can be used to build multiple build targets in parallel. ### 15. Reliable build system with well defined build units. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Martin B. | Software Developer, Automotive, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2019 **What do you like best about SCons?** Solid choice for a big project. If needed it can be easily adapted and changed. You can also make build systems on top of it. **What do you dislike about SCons?** Build times can be a bit long when integrated with code generators and multiple compilers. **Recommendations to others considering SCons:** its goood **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** SCons was the first build system that I used so it helped me seeing the uses of having description build files how to link and compile your source. ### 16. A very powerful build tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 20, 2016 **What do you like best about SCons?** I like the following features of Scons. - the speed - reliability - easy to use - ability to run multiple tasks in parallel **What do you dislike about SCons?** I have been using 'Make' framework for a long time. Then for one of the new projects, I had to use 'Scons' framework. Coming from 'Make' background, and since Scons provide so many features, it took sometime to get familiarized with Scons concepts, etc. The initial time to learn about Scons is little bit more. **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** Used scons to build a very big product. Mainly used Scons for the speed and ability to run multiple tasks in parallel. And ofcourse, is is written in python. We heavily use python and so its easy for all of us to write the build rules in Scons. ### 17. Great build tool, if only a bit verbose **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David A. | Network Engineer, Computer Hardware, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 19, 2016 **What do you like best about SCons?** Python. Anything we want with the build system, can be scripted in python. Instead of going with some new language (looking at you cmake), this tried and tested method works very well. As it is built on python, it supports most of the common platforms, many compilers and targets out of the box. On top of it, scons-local can be distributed with the project, one less dependency is always a benefit. One advantage scons has over others that it builds the targets, not just the build-files, unlike cmake. **What do you dislike about SCons?** The biggest problems of scons lies with python. While some adore python, the usefulness of its indented syntax is up for debate. Then again, as python is slow compared to compiled build tools, the build system itself gets slow for larger projects. Compared to other build systems, even for some of the common tasks we need to write custom scripts. Scons is built around the idea of a build directory, need to go large lengths to avoid this. **Recommendations to others considering SCons:** If you are well invested in a system, you probably will not be using this. However, if you are looking for something entirely new, go with scons. If learning a language is the problem, might as well be python. **What problems is SCons solving and how is that benefiting you?** For most of the projects, where the speed did not change by a large margin we switched to scons and never looked back. Most of us know our way around python and the one command to build everything has been a great feature. ## SCons Discussions - [What is SCons used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-scons-used-for) - [View SCons pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/scons/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-26+15%3A36%3A13+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=e5d205b4-c42f-452b-9d2e-a881ad516a55&secure%5Btoken%5D=6d1bcb5ab6349411d7e362046d21869a827b54c2d4edb0a2d777337a703450a7&format=llm_user) ## Top SCons Alternatives - [CMake](https://www.g2.com/products/cmake/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (17 reviews) - [GNU Make](https://www.g2.com/products/gnu-make/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (18 reviews) - [GNU Automake](https://www.g2.com/products/gnu-automake/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (11 reviews)