Difference between Ant and Maven

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.