GNU Autoconf is a tool for producing configure scripts for building, installing and packaging software on computer systems where a Bourne shell is available.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Platforms
- Linux

GNU Make is described as 'Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files' and is an app in the development category. There are more than 25 alternatives to GNU Make for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD and Self-Hosted apps. The best GNU Make alternative is CMake, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like GNU Make are Maven, Gradle, Ant and pypyr.
GNU Autoconf is a tool for producing configure scripts for building, installing and packaging software on computer systems where a Bourne shell is available.

Buck is a build system developed and used by Facebook. It encourages the creation of small, reusable modules consisting of code and resources, and supports a variety of languages on many platforms.

qmake is a tool from The Qt Company that helps simplify the build process for development project across different platforms. qmake automates the generation of Makefiles so that only a few lines of information are needed to create each Makefile.
Open source build system featuring multiplatform support, extremely fast full and incremental builds, cross-compilation for operating systems and bare metal, readable build files using a non-Turing complete DSL, and built-in dependency management.
GNU Automake is a programming tool that produces portable makefiles for use by the make program, used in compiling software.

EBuild is a software project build, dependency management and reporting technology. The aim is to be able to tackle any build problem in a structured, declarative and elegant way. It is extensible via a plugin interface.
Tup is a file-based build system for Linux, OSX, and Windows. It inputs a list of file changes and a directed acyclic graph (DAG), then processes the DAG to execute the appropriate commands required to update dependent files.
PHing Is Not GNU make; it's a PHP project build system or build tool based on ?Apache Ant. You can do anything with it that you could do with a traditional build system like GNU make, and its use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP "task" classes make it...
Cake (C# Make) is a cross-platform build automation system with a C# DSL for tasks such as compiling code, copying files and folders, running unit tests, compressing files and building NuGet packages.

CheckInstall is a Linux program which eases installation & uninstallation of software compiled from source. After software compilation it can automatically generate a Slackware, RPM, or Debian-compatible package that can later be cleanly uninstalled.
NAnt is a free .NET build tool. In theory it is kind of like make without make's wrinkles. In practice it's a lot like Ant.