GNU Make vs Jenkins comparison

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GNU Make

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

GNU Make and Jenkins compete in automation and build management. Jenkins has an advantage with its extensive plugin ecosystem and CI/CD capabilities.

Features: GNU Make is known for handling dependency graphs and rules efficiently. It supports static pattern rules for source compilation and integrates with third-party dependency builders. Jenkins features an extensive set of plugins, offers advanced CI/CD functionalities, and integrates with various tools, enhancing its extensibility.

Room for Improvement: GNU Make could enhance its GUI and modernize its declarative syntax to support advanced automation needs. Jenkins requires improvements in initial configuration complexity and its extensive reliance on plugins can make troubleshooting time-consuming. Better native support features could streamline workflows.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: GNU Make is easy to install, requiring minimal configuration and providing a lightweight solution. Jenkins demands more setup effort, but benefits from comprehensive documentation and community support, offering scalable orchestration suitable for large projects.

Pricing and ROI: Both GNU Make and Jenkins are open source without direct setup costs. GNU Make provides a reliable ROI for simple builds. Jenkins offers scalability and automation efficiencies, which justify potential higher initial investments in configuration and maintenance.

To learn more, read our detailed GNU Make vs. Jenkins Report (Updated: December 2025).

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GNU Make vs. Jenkins

December 2025

Helped 880,745 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

GNU Make

Ranking in Build Automation

16th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Jenkins

Ranking in Build Automation

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GNU Make is 1.5%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 7.5%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Jenkins	7.5%
GNU Make	1.5%
Other	91.0%

Build Automation

Featured Reviews

Josh Call

Software Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Enhances productivity with efficient dependency handling and a straightforward setup

GNU Make is used as a build system tool. Most people don't use GNU Make directly but utilize other systems like CMake to generate Make files, which are then run by GNU Make. This is common for tasks like compiling C++ code. In the industry, AI developers, for example, use GNU Make in their work…

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Jamshaid I

Principal Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Efficient resource allocation and robust workflow with autoscaling capabilities

In Kubernetes, we use node-based architecture with nodes and pods and follow practices like RBAC and rollback. Multiple pods can run concurrently. We benefit from Kubernetes' ability to autoscale pods and use horizontal pod autoscalers to adjust the number of pods based on metrics like CPU or memory usage, ensuring efficient resource allocation and stability under load.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The initial setup of GNU Make is straightforward."

"I have not encountered any scalability issues with GNU Make. It is as scalable as the project's structure is, and then some."

"GNU Make is such an essential tool that it is almost impossible to imagine working without it. Not having it, developers would probably have to resort to doing everything manually or via shell scripts."

"Setup is extremely straightforward."

"Makefiles are extremely easy to work with using any preferred editor. GNU Make can be run directly from the terminal, not requiring any time wasted on clicking."

"Full-featured syntax allows building strategies as simple or as complex as one wishes, and declarative approach fits the task really well. Wide adoption also means that everybody knows what GNU Make is and how to use it."

"The initial setup is pretty simple."

"The solution is scalable and has a large number of plugins that can help you scale it to your needs."

"Distributed execution of build and test jobs."

"Automation of chores like deployment, frequent manual tasks (like running scripts on test and production systems) reduced the time used and the number of errors made by engineers, freeing them to do meaningful work instead."

"Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes."

"The simplicity of Jenkins and the evolving ecosystem of Jenkins are most valuable. Today, you do not have to write a pipeline from scratch. The library functionality of Jenkins helps you to bring all those in ready-made, and you also get the best practices for them. That is a great feature of Jenkins, and that is why it is being used significantly."

"We use Jenkins to automatically build Python binaries into several OS's i.e. OS X, Ubuntu, Windows 32-bit and Windows 64-bit."

"Continuous Integration. Jenkins can integrate with almost any systems used for application development and testing, with its plugins."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"GNU Make requires using the Tab symbol as the first symbol of command line for execution. In some text editors this can be problematic, as they automatically insert spaces instead of tabs."

"Vanilla GNU Make does not support any kind of colored output. A wrapper named colormake exists to work around this, but native (opt-in) support would be welcome."

"GNU Make does not provide traditional customer support."

"Upgrading and maintaining plugins can be painful, as sometimes upgrading a plugin can break functionality of another plugin that a job is dependent on."

"Jenkins should adopt the Pipeline as Code approach by building a deployment pipeline using the Jenkins file."

"Jenkins can improve by continuing to add additional plugins for all the new solutions that are coming out within the cloud sphere."

"There are some difficulties when we need to execute the DB script."

"The disadvantage of Jenkins is writing Groovy scripts. There are other CI tools where you do not need to write this many scripts to manage and deploy."

"Jenkins could have better cloud functionality. Currently, we are using the existing legacy model, but we are moving toward the cloud, so it would be great if they could improve in that area. In the future, I would like more cloud features and related training materials, like a video tutorial."

"Jenkins is an open-source solution, and people tend to stay on the same version for a long time. When you look for an answer on Google, you often find something that doesn't relate to your implementation. The plugins are both the aspect of Jenkins and also one of the worst because the plugins can have different versions, so it's hard to figure out how to solve the problems."

"This solution could be improved by removing the storage of unnecessary data such as the history of test deployments that were unsuccessful."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is no price for this product. No licensing. It’s open-source."

"GNU Make is free and open source software."

"Jenkins is open source."

"Jenkins is a free open-source server."

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There is not a license required to use the solution because it is open-source."

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

"The solution is open source."

"In our company, we do pay for the licensing of the solution."

"The pricing for Jenkins is free."

"It's free software with a big community behind it, which is very good."

More Jenkins pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user184734

Systems Administrator at Facebook

Jan 22, 2015

I generally find TeamCity a lot more intuitive than Jenkins.

Moving to TeamCity from Jenkins At work, we’re slowly migrating from Jenkins to TeamCity in the hope of ending some of our recurring problems with continuous integration. My use of Jenkins prior to this job has been almost strictly on a personal basis, although I pretty much only use Travis…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	15
Large Enterprise	56

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GNU Make?

GNU Make is a free solution that comes with Linux, which positively impacts operational costs by eliminating licensing fees.

What needs improvement with GNU Make?

I am not familiar enough with it to suggest any specific new features or areas for improvement. It occupies its niche well.

What is your primary use case for GNU Make?

How does Tekton compare with Jenkins?

When you are evaluating tools for automating your own GitOps-based CI/CD workflow, it is important to keep your requirements and use cases in mind. Tekton deployment is complex and it is not very e...

What do you like most about Jenkins?

Jenkins has been instrumental in automating our build and deployment processes.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jenkins?

Jenkins is used in many companies to save money, especially within R&D divisions, by avoiding the expenses of proprietary tools.

More GNU Make Competitors

Comparisons

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Compared 24% of the time

TeamCity vs GNU Make

Compared 18% of the time

CloudBees vs GNU Make

Compared 18% of the time

GitLab vs Jenkins

Compared 12% of the time

Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 8% of the time

TeamCity vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

JFrog Pipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 7% of the time

VMware Tanzu Platform vs Jenkins

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Download GNU Make product report

Build Automation

January 2026

Download Jenkins product report

January 2026

Overview

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

Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Airial, Clarus Financial Technology, cubetutor, Metawidget, mysocio, namma, silverpeas, Sokkva, So Rave, tagzbox