It's been two months since this profile received a new review

CMake Reviews & Product Details

CMake is a family of tools designed to build, test and package software. CMake is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler independent configuration files. CMake generates native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice.

Seller

Kitware

Discussions

CMake Community

Overview by

Bill Hoffman (Vice President at Kitware Inc.)

Top-Rated Alternatives

View All Alternatives

G2 reviews are authentic and verified.

Here's how.

Sinan .

Network Engineer

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

1/14/2022

"CMake Review"

4/5

What do you like best about CMake?

It is a cross-platform tool so everything can be build and test and package in the same software to go with it. You can make a single source tree to make multiple projects. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CMake?

From the cmake website itself there is no good website to guide you or give some examples to build or troubleshoot the problem. Also, the community is very low for this product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Inci C.

Telecommunication Engineer

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

1/19/2022

"A Must Try for Programmers"

3.5/5

What do you like best about CMake?

What I like best about this product is, it lets me be more organized between my projects and it has different kinds of libraries for different stages of coding, namely static, shared and module. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CMake?

Using Cmake could be challenging for beginners. It is not a well-known product. Because the community is small, when you face a problem, you can not reach many people. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Remigio J.

Application and Content Designer

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

9/17/2021

"Build and test software."

3.5/5

What do you like best about CMake?

Control the compilation process, independent configuration file and online service support.

Independent community of development and constant communication to correct errors and apply improvement. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CMake?

Installing on little known GNU Linux distributions is long, compile and search for source code. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Gaurav Kumar G.

Software Engineer L5 and Software Architect

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

3/10/2020

"Cmake is one of the best tool"

5/5

What do you like best about CMake?

Cmake is one of the best tool I have to generate make file and for making build. It will free you from lots of burden and save time for building. I really recommend cmake. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CMake?

I did not see any negative points in cmake as of now Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Cosmin P.

Software Developer

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

3/9/2020

"Reliably, powerful."

4/5

What do you like best about CMake?

Power of the cmake is tremendous, you can use it in so many ways, building packages was the most used by me. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CMake?

A little hard to understand in the beginning. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Research

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

4/2/2018

"For quick, efficient and cross-platform solution builder"

4.5/5

What do you like best about CMake?

I love the fact that I can create a general solution and just and projects after the other so easily, rebuild the entire solution, change environment... everything while staying cross-platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CMake?

The tool is a bit low level and a few of my coworkers are reluctant to use it because it can be scary and seem complicated at the beginning. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering CMake:

Do not be scared and take the time to learn how to use it properly, you'll save time on the long run. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CMake solving and how is that benefiting you?

I easily build proof of concept and demonstration for my prospects and customers and keep everything on my machine, in a global environment which I never have to change ! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Mechanical or Industrial Engineering

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

3/7/2018

"Easy-to-use deployment system"

4.5/5

What do you like best about CMake?

CMake is easy to begin with compared to GNU autotool chains, just follow the official instructions. You could find library and add the include and linking directories with just one line. CMake can even download / compile / install dependencies automatically. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CMake?

Although CMake is easy to begin with, CMake does lots of tricks, which sometimes make its behaviors unpredictable. You have to be very careful and follow the official documents closely to avoid some annoying problems. But for most projects we do not have to use these fancy features, CMake is still the only deployment system that I use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Trevor H.

Senior Software Engineer

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

12/28/2017

"the non-elegant standard for cross-platform builds"

3.5/5

What do you like best about CMake?

You thought writing software was hard? Try getting it to build and run on all kinds of different devices and operating systems. This is where CMake shines. It's currently the best build system out there for cross-platform development. Getting software to work on Windows, Mac, and the various flavors of linux is still no easy task, but CMake is the answer from the build perspective.

It also has a big community and tooling support has been growing rapidly.

You'll be able to find some kind of IDE support guaranteed. Visual Studio / Jet Brains.

The support was added recently, but you should be able to use it in production. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CMake?

Terrible syntax, and very slow start up times. Let me begin with the start-up times. We actually had to move away from CMake because our code base got so large that the initial parsing and book-keeping of CMake was taking way too long. We'd wait 5 minutes just to have CMake tell us that everything was already built. Maybe there were work-arounds for this, but overall we decided to switch to the big hitters (buck, blaze, bazel, ninja).

The syntax is bad but most people just shrug and say, "hey as long as I can get my software built".

The thing is though, that eventually you'll want to mix languages, mix compilers, do debugs, releases, doc generation, special test artifacts, and the syntax of Cmake becomes a hindrance. Other languages let you build rules in a python/groovy like syntax, and this is key. The language of a build system is more important than people first realize, and kludging together your build with a hacky macro language becomes a deal breaker. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering CMake:

If you're working in a small project (say less than 5,000 files), CMake is a good choice.

Regardless of what operating system you're developing on, and regardless of your targets, CMake is a good choice. It has a great community. If you have issues, there are plenty of people to help answer questions. If you are only on linux, mixing languages, and your codebase is very large, take a look at some of the build systems that have come out of Facebook / Google instead. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CMake solving and how is that benefiting you?

Again, CMake solves the problem of cross-compilation through consistency of single build files.

Its pretty simple to take a working CMake example and roll with it. The barrier of entry to using CMake is low, but the difficulty increases as you attempt to do unique and novel things within your software build. Yet, I'd still say that CMake is much easier than writing raw Makefiles. CMake provides a hint of confidence to users in the open source community as well. I'm much more willing to contribute to a project if I see Cmake, as apposed to raw makefiles (or no build files at all). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Subhendu M.

Systems engineer

Information Technology and Services

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

10/21/2016

"The gold standard build tool for most projects "

4.5/5

What do you like best about CMake?

CMake ties every build tool together with a glue, be it for make for linux or mingw-make/vs for windows. No more dependency errors, Has in-built os specific macros to search for libraries needed to compile. Has a nice gui for those who need it. Spits out errors in a graceful manner. Can specify which version of a lib to use, minimum cmake version supported etc.. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CMake?

Frankly, there isn't much to dislike about cmake. CmakeLists.txt can be streamlined a bit, easier command line switches, that is all. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering CMake:

Give it a go, seriously, It is so simple and fluid and user friendly that one simply can't go wrong with cmake. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CMake solving and how is that benefiting you?

Since the years we have switched to cmake, build process has become a lot more streamlined. As we have multiple OSes ranging from Windows to ubuntu-server to RHEL and some tools needed to be built for all of them. Now, only one os independent cmakelists.txt can generate build files for those OSes. As a friend of mine said, 'before cmake, we had to use make and got thousands of dependency errors, now stuff works.' Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ghada B.

R&D Engineer

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

6/25/2016

"The great Build framework for c++ programmer"

4.5/5

What do you like best about CMake?

Qt Creator presents a lot of interesting features that I found useful:

- It is a build system generator.

- It is cross-platform, free and open-source software

- Requiring C++ compiler on its own build system

- Generates projects for many different IDEs.

- CMake has its own scripting language that runs on all platforms that CMake targets.

- It is used in conjunction with native build environments such as make, Xcode, and Microsoft Visual Studio.

- Supports outputting to projects like Code::Blocks, Xcode, etc.

- Easy to use and work with.

- stable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CMake?

I can't really find anything that i dislike. Qt Creator is fulfilling all my needs as for now. Maybe, the only thing that bothered me was the documentation is not good and need some improvement. Apart from that, everything else was fine. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering CMake:

I recommend CMake for anyone who wants to build c++ projects, It is is a great way to manage multiple projects and updating them easly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CMake solving and how is that benefiting you?

I am currently working with CMake, I used it to plain Makefile and generate configuration files to ease the process of building and updating my c++ projects. The build project contains a CMakeLists.txt file in every directory that controls the build process. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.