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
Ant doesn't has formal conventions, so we need to provide information of the project structure in build.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.
There is no life cycle in Ant.
It is a tool box.
It is mainly a build tool.
The ant scripts are not reusable.
It is less preferred than Maven.
Maven
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.
Maven is declarative, everything you define in the pom.xml file.
There is life cycle in Maven.
It is a framework.
It is mainly a project management tool.
The maven plugins are reusable.
It is more preferred than Ant.