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GNU Make vs Tekton comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 5, 2025

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
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Tekton
Ranking in Build Automation
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Build Automation category, the mindshare of GNU Make is 1.7%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tekton is 4.0%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Build Automation Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Tekton4.0%
GNU Make1.7%
Other94.3%
Build Automation
 

Featured Reviews

JC
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…
reviewer2741265 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Benefit from a smooth learning curve and efficient adaptability
After seeing Jenkins and Tekton, I think Tekton is quite built on top of Kubernetes, so the learning curve is minimal. If you are working with Kubernetes, then OpenShift created Tekton on top of that, making it easily adaptable. Tekton is highly customizable. With Kubernetes, we can customize on our own and create custom builders. If teams have time and want to make enhancements, they can do it themselves. Whatever OpenShift is providing regarding Tekton is sufficient. It is easy to use because we don't need to write every pod step every time. A proper DevOps engineer can help once or twice, and development teams can easily adapt to that, make small shell script changes in the steps, understand the process, and work with it.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 of GNU Make is straightforward."
"One of the best things about GNU Make is that, it is available on almost all Linux platforms."
"GNU make is a build automation utility for running builds on various Linux flavored platforms."
"I have not encountered any scalability issues with GNU Make. It is as scalable as the project's structure is, and then some."
"I think this product has all you need."
"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."
"Make tool, originally made for the GNU operating system, helps in the generation of executable from the main program source files."
"Tekton is an orchestrator. It provides seamless integration for our pipelines. It offers robust support for executing tasks within the pipeline, allowing us to set up and run pipelines quickly."
"The product's best feature is its ease of implementation."
"The flexibility of Tekton is the most valuable feature"
"Tekton's inclusion in Kubernetes deployment offers better visibility on how Tekton is performing within a cluster. It is lightweight and not as heavy as Jenkins to maintain."
"The feature that I like most about Tekton is that it is built for Kubernetes, so we can utilize our resources effectively."
"The platform's most valuable feature is its wireless capability, which makes installation easy and sets up the flow."
"I find it beneficial to show data from Tekton to another GitHub or Bitbucket pipeline."
"I like the branching and visualization tools for the pipeline."
 

Cons

"Vanilla GNU Make does not support any kind of colored output."
"GNU make is a bad candidate for builds that require incremental builds often, as it does not support this feature."
"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."
"Poor reliability for larger or incremental builds."
"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."
"Make’s reliability is very poor and is not suitable for larger or incremental builds."
"GNU Make does not provide traditional customer support."
"Some of the tool's cons include its minimalistic dashboard, which lacks detailed information and control compared to other tools like Jenkins or GitLab. Additionally, it's primarily used by Japanese companies."
"Initially, working with YAML configuration can be challenging using the solution."
"Tekton is a good product with all the features I need. There isn't anything that needs improvement."
"The tool should improve in terms of output flexibility. It runs on a specific Kubernetes machine, and the persistent memory storage is on a single partition. Improving this aspect could make analyzing logs and toolchain outputs from external tools easier."
"When we started with Tekton around 2021 or early 2022, the community support was somewhat limited, which posed challenges when dealing with issues or debugging. We had to rely on Red Hat OpenShift support to overcome these challenges. However, I believe that these issues will naturally improve over timeas the developer community grows stronger. From a technical perspective, I haven't had the opportunity to deeply evaluate the product end-to-end, especially in the past year or so, when I've been less involved with it."
"Improvement is needed in the documentation and the overall integration process."
"Tekton should have more accessibility for some rare use cases so that we can have more references when applying some techniques to our pipeline."
"If you are a beginner, then accessing the flexibility part can be overwhelming. We think the learning curve of the tool is steep, especially for those who are not already familiar with Kubernetes."
 

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."
"The product is free and open-source."
"It is entirely open source and free of charge."
"Tekton is an open-source tool."
"The tool is open-source and free to use."
"The solution is open-source."
"The product is free of cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
6%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise23
 

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?
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 task...
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 needs improvement with Tekton?
I didn't get the intention of scalability. Scalability means based on the load, it will automatically gain resources and run. The question of pipeline scalability remains unclear. It's quite easy t...
What is your primary use case for Tekton?
We use Tekton for build and deployments. For LMP testing, we use the Tekton pipeline. We also use GitHub CI/CD. For infrastructure pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), we use Tekton. Previou...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
The Home Depot, PayPal, Target, HSBC, McKesson, Oncology Venture
Find out what your peers are saying about GNU Make vs. Tekton and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.