Maven - Maven vs Ant - maven tutorial

Difference between Ant and Maven?

Maven is better for managing dependencies (but Ant is ok with them too, if you use Ant+Ivy) and build artifacts.
The main benefit from maven - its lifecycle. ... Ant is better for controlling of build process. Before your very first build you have to write you build.xml.
Maven vs. Ant is one of the semi-religious topics (like IntelliJ vs. Eclipse, SWT vs. Swing or Spring vs. EJB).
Dependent on you specifics needs, both build tools may be interesting for you.
Ant is just a framework, or a build-DSL which cannot be used out of the box.
You have to create your build-script from existing Ant-tasks.
The Ant tasks do not presrcibe any conventions or configuration - the definition of project layout is your responsibility.

Learn Maven Tutorial - Ant vs Maven - Maven Example

Ant and Maven both are build tools provided by Apache.
The main purpose of these technologies is to ease the build process of a project.
There are many differences between ant and maven that are given below:

Ant	Maven
Ant doesn't has formal conventions, so we need to provide information of the project structure in build.xml file.	Maven has a convention to place source code, compiled code etc. So we don't need to provide information about the project structure in pom.xml file.
Ant is procedural, you need to provide information about what to do and when to do through code. You need to provide order.	Maven is declarative, everything you define in the pom.xml file.
There is no life cycle in Ant.	There is life cycle in Maven.
It is a tool box.	It is a framework.
It is mainly a build tool.	It is mainly a project management tool.
The ant scripts are not reusable.	The maven plugins are reusable.
It is less preferred than Maven.	It is more preferred than Ant.