Bazel

a fast, scalable, multi-language and extensible build system (by bazelbuild)

Bazel Alternatives

Similar projects and alternatives to Bazel

  1. Visual Studio Code

    3,164 Bazel VS Visual Studio Code

    Visual Studio Code

  2. InfluxDB

    InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.

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  3. go

    2,279 Bazel VS go

    The Go programming language

  4. Angular

    809 Bazel VS Angular

    Deliver web apps with confidence 🚀

  5. llvm-project

    The LLVM Project is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies.

  6. nix

    413 Bazel VS nix

    Nix, the purely functional package manager

  7. Poetry

    410 Bazel VS Poetry

    Python packaging and dependency management made easy

  8. nx

    374 Bazel VS nx

    An AI-first build platform that connects everything from your editor to CI. Helping you deliver fast, without breaking things.

  9. Stream

    Stream - Scalable APIs for Chat, Feeds, Moderation, & Video. Stream helps developers build engaging apps that scale to millions with performant and flexible Chat, Feeds, Moderation, and Video APIs and SDKs powered by a global edge network and enterprise-grade infrastructure.

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  10. chromium

    254 Bazel VS chromium

    The official GitHub mirror of the Chromium source

  11. tensorflow

    236 Bazel VS tensorflow

    An Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Everyone

  12. cosmopolitan

    build-once run-anywhere c library

  13. gRPC

    223 Bazel VS gRPC

    C++ based gRPC (C++, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, PHP, C#)

  14. just

    210 Bazel VS just

    🤖 Just a command runner

  15. lerna

    172 Bazel VS lerna

    Lerna is a fast, modern build system for managing and publishing multiple JavaScript/TypeScript packages from the same repository.

  16. Task

    131 Bazel VS Task

    A task runner / simpler Make alternative written in Go

  17. meson

    113 Bazel VS meson

    The Meson Build System

  18. abseil-cpp

    65 Bazel VS abseil-cpp

    Abseil Common Libraries (C++)

  19. ninja

    55 Bazel VS ninja

    a small build system with a focus on speed

  20. pants

    41 Bazel VS pants

    The Pants Build System

  21. buck2

    39 Bazel VS buck2

    Build system, successor to Buck

  22. Buck

    14 Bazel VS Buck

    Discontinued A fast build system that encourages the creation of small, reusable modules over a variety of platforms and languages.

  23. SaaSHub

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a better Bazel alternative or higher similarity.

Bazel discussion

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Bazel reviews and mentions

Posts with mentions or reviews of Bazel. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-06-06.
  • Swift and Cute 2D Game Framework: Setting Up a Project with CMake
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jun 2025
  • Why Is This Site Built with C
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Mar 2025
    Agree regarding easiness of building rust (`cargo build`), extremely satisfying (git clone and cargo build...)

    Does anyone have any comments on Bazel[1] because I'm kind of settling on using it whenever it's appropriate (c/c++)?..

    [1] https://bazel.build/

  • Chicory: A JVM native WebAssembly runtime
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Feb 2025
    Chicory seems like it'll be pretty useful. Java doesn't have easy access to the platform-specific security mechanisms (seccomp, etc) that are used by native tools to sandbox their plugins, so it's nice to have WebAssembly's well-designed security model in a pure-JVM library.

    I've used it to experiment with using WebAssembly to extend the Bazel build system (which is written in Java). Currently there are several Bazel rulesets that need platform-specific helper binaries for things like parsing lock files or Cargo configs, and that's exactly the kind of logic that could happily move into a WebAssembly blob.

    https://github.com/jmillikin/upstream__bazel/commits/repo-ru...

    https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/discussions/23487

  • Is NixOS truly reproducible?
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Feb 2025
    > Bazel also obviously uses the system compilers and headers. Nix does not.

    Bazel allows hermetic toolchains, and uses it for most languages: Java, Python, Go, Rust, Node.js, etc. You can do the same for C++, but Bazel doesn't provide that out-of-the-box. [1]

    Bazel sandboxing can restrict system access on Linux with --experimental_use_hermetic_linux_sandbox and --sandbox_add_mount_pair. [2]

    Every "reproducible builds" discussion requires an understand of what is permitted to vary. E.g. Neither Nix nor Bazel attempts to make build products the same for x86 host environments vs ARM host environment. Bazel is less aggressive than Nix in that it does not (by default) attempt to make build products the same for different host C++ compilers.

    [1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/discussions/18332

    [2] https://bazel.build/reference/command-line-reference#flag--e...

  • Rhai: An embedded scripting language for Rust
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jan 2025
    You can say that for everything, after all of it's turing complete you can do anything.

    But practically, the difference is intention, which drives design and ecosystem.

    E.g: starlark is very oriented toward idenpotence and limiting side effects to get reproducible config data. By default they discourage reading files: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/13300

    But rhai is not particularly oriented toward config, and the doc promotes an extension to read files: https://rhai.rs/book/lib/rhai-fs.html

    The tutorials, stdlib, language design anf tooling will all reflect this.

  • Resolving Python Import Failures in Bazel with `proto_library` Targets
    1 project | dev.to | 27 Dec 2024
    At some point in the future it might be enabled by default
  • Bazel 8.0 Released
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Dec 2024
  • 7 Ways to Use the SLSA Framework to Secure the SDLC
    3 projects | dev.to | 12 Nov 2024
    To achieve reproducibility, your build process must control for environmental differences like timestamps, file ordering, or machine-specific configurations. Tools like Bazel or Nixprovide deterministic build systems that lock down these variables. For instance, Bazel uses a content-addressable cache, meaning the same source code and dependencies always result in the same build outputs, even when run on different machines.
  • Contributing To Open Source - C++ Edition
    4 projects | dev.to | 8 Oct 2024
    Despite following all the steps (on both Windows and Unix), I couldn't get the cmake build to succeed. After several hours of debugging, I decided to try another build method provided by the project, using bazel, which was much simpler.
  • How to effectively work in big codebases
    1 project | dev.to | 15 Aug 2024
    Many big companies have built their own tools to reign in this complexity and make it easier and faster for developers to work on large, multi-language code bases. Meta has buck, Amazon has brazil, and Google has bazel. But from my experience, especially, with brazil, these tools also have some rough edges, so understanding how they work can go a long way.
  • A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
    www.saashub.com | 20 Jul 2025
    SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives Learn more →

Stats

Basic Bazel repo stats
147
24,312
10.0
2 days ago

bazelbuild/bazel is an open source project licensed under Apache License 2.0 which is an OSI approved license.

The primary programming language of Bazel is Java.


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