Software Alternatives & Reviews

CMake VS MSBuild

Compare CMake VS MSBuild and see what are their differences

CMake logo CMake

CMake is an open-source, cross-platform family of tools designed to build, test and package software.

MSBuild logo MSBuild

MSBuild is the build platform for .NET and Visual Studio.
  • CMake Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-09-21

We recommend LibHunt CMake for discovery and comparisons of trending CMake projects.

  • MSBuild Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-04

CMake videos

CMake for Dummies

More videos:

  • Review - CppCon 2017: Mathieu Ropert “Using Modern CMake Patterns to Enforce a Good Modular Design”
  • Review - Hunter, a CMake driven package manager for C/C++ projects - Daniel Friedrich - Lightning Talks

MSBuild videos

07 - Profundizando con MSBuild / Jenkins

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to CMake and MSBuild)
Front End Package Manager
DevOps Tools
0 0%
100% 100
JavaScript Package Manager
JS Build Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, CMake seems to be a lot more popular than MSBuild. While we know about 51 links to CMake, we've tracked only 4 mentions of MSBuild. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

CMake mentions (51)

  • Top 7 C++ Tools to explore in 2024 if it's not already the case.
    CMake stands for "Cross-platform Make" and is an open-source, platform-independent build system. It's designed to build, test, and package software projects written in C and C++, but it can also be used for other languages. Here's an overview of CMake and its features:. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • My first Software Release using GitHub Release
    When doing research for this lab exercise I looked at both vcpkg and conan. Both are package managers that would automate the installation and configuration of my program with its dependencies. However, when it came to releasing and sharing my program my options were limited. For example, the central public registry for conan packages is conan-center, but these packages are curated and the process is very... - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • A little help for a C++ newbie
    Install the CMake program using your system package manager, e.g. Sudo apt-get install cmake. Source: 7 months ago
  • Questions Regarding working with Mingw_w64, MSYS2, and CMake on Windows
    Oh I just assumed it was talking about the one from cmake.org since I was having trouble. I can now confirm that mingw-w64-cmake and the binary from cmake.org do operate in mostly identical ways. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Questions Regarding working with Mingw_w64, MSYS2, and CMake on Windows
    Then looking at any one of the many examples provided on cmake.org, it's clearly a viable way to do set(CMAKE_*), (e.g., set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 11) Set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD_REQUIRED True)). Of course, another way to set these variables is to use the -D flag as you suggested, but I was just wondering why you would prohibit using set(CMAKE_*). Source: about 1 year ago
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MSBuild mentions (4)

  • [Copilot has] been a massive productivity improvement to our senior devs, and I got so used to it that it's an annoyance when Copilot doesn't respond.
    Here is a taste of what to expect: https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild. Source: over 1 year ago
  • The most interesting C# / .NET blogs and websites
    You can't do without source files when you want to better understand what is happening "under the hood" of a particular system. For example, do you want to improve your understanding of how types from the standard library work? The source code of .NET Framework and .NET will help you to do that. Do you want to dig deeper into the compiler? No problem - here is the Roslyn's source code at your service. Do you need... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • OWASP Top Ten and Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
    At the moment, we plan to implement the specified functionality for the C# analyzer. It's easy to obtain the list of dependencies for a C# project. Roslyn helps us a lot — our analyzer is built on its base. To be more precise, the main factor is the use of the same build platform (MSBuild) and a compiler for all C# projects. At the same time Roslyn is closely related to MSBuild. This makes obtaining the... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Standard File/Project Structure?
    Https://github.com/dotnet/msbuild is up there too. Source: almost 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing CMake and MSBuild, you can also consider the following products

GNU Make - GNU Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files.

Ansible - Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine

SCons - SCons is an Open Source software construction tool—that is, a next-generation build tool.

Gradle - Accelerate developer productivity. Gradle helps teams build, automate and deliver better software, faster. DocsExplore the documentation of Gradle. Find installation ..

Ninja Build - Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed.

Apache Maven - Apache Maven is a project comprehension and management software tool.