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: September 2025).

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GNU Make vs. Jenkins

September 2025

Helped 870,697 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

18th

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 October 2025, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GNU Make is 1.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jenkins is 9.1%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Build Automation Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Jenkins	9.1%
GNU Make	1.0%
Other	89.9%

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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Annamalai Pts

DevOps Engineer at Tech Mahindra Limited

Streamlined CI/CD pipelines with powerful integration and an easy setup

I use Jenkins as a CI/CD tool. We create pipelines using Jenkins, with stages for Maven builds, Docker image builds, SonarQube integration, and deploying the image to a Kubernetes cluster, AWS EKS Jenkins has made the developers' work very easy. They commit to the remote repository, and…

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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

"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."

"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."

"The initial setup of GNU Make is straightforward."

"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."

"Setup is extremely straightforward."

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

"It's very useful when you want to automate different processes from beginning to end."

"This is a great integration tool and very powerful."

"We have started to integrate Pipelines as a part of a build, and built a library of common functions. It simplified and made our build scripts more readable."

"Jenkins has excellent task planning features."

"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."

"It's a powerful tool for CI/CD."

"For business needs, Jenkins is the most relevant choice because it can be self-hosted, the price is good, it’s robust, and requires almost no effort for maintenance."

"Has a good interface, is reliable and saves time."

More Jenkins pros

Cons

"GNU Make does not provide traditional customer support."

"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 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."

"Jenkins could improve in areas related to Kubernetes and Docker container integration, like machine allocation of nodes and Marshaling integration improvements."

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

"Improvement-wise, I would want the solution's user interface to be changed for the better. In short, the solution can be made more user-friendly."

"The solution could improve by having more advanced integrations."

"It could be cheaper."

"In our case, we have several products built using Jenkins. It is quite difficult to navigate into the latest stable build in a given OS."

"The bug fix speed is very slow."

"Centralized user management would be helpful."

More Jenkins cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"GNU Make is free and open source software."

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

"It is a free product."

"Jenkins is an open-source tool."

"Jenkins is a free solution, it is open source."

"There is no cost. It is open source."

"The pricing for Jenkins is free."

"We are using the free version of Jenkins. There are no costs or licensing."

"Some of the add-ons are too expensive."

"Jenkins is not expensive and reasonably priced."

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

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

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.

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Harness vs Jenkins

Compared 13% of the time

JFrog Pipeline vs Jenkins

Compared 9% of the time

TeamCity vs Jenkins

Compared 8% 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

September 2025

Download Jenkins product report

October 2025

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