My coworker asked me to describe how Maven compares and differs to Ant. I realized how hard it was for me to describe what a developer gets for moving their build process from Ant scripts to Maven. I can't make the argument that you can do X with Maven but not with Ant because I don't really have a valid example. However, I am inclined to make the argument that you can do X with both but with Maven it's easier. With Maven, you collect metadata about your project instead of writing scripts defining the steps your build will take. For example, if you look at an Ant script you'll immediately see that it is organized as targets which many developers use to define and group the steps of their build process. In a Maven POM file, you won't see similar build steps defined. This can be confusing for a new Maven user coming from the world of Ant. I know it was for me. Instead, you'll see lots of metadata about the project such as dependencies, Maven plugins to use