Unlike Make, which uses the Makefile format, Ant uses XML to describe the code build process and its dependencies.

Ant ("Another Neat Tool")[5] was conceived by James Duncan Davidson while preparing Sun Microsystems's reference JSP and Servlet engine, later Apache Tomcat, for release as open-source.

Several proposals for an Ant version 2 have been made, such as AntEater by James Duncan Davidson, Myrmidon by Peter Donald [6] and Mutant by Conor MacNeill, none of which were able to find large acceptance with the developer community.

Gradle, which is similar software, was created in 2008, which in contrary uses Groovy (and a few other languages) code instead of XML.

The WOProject extensions allow WebObjects developers to use ant in building their frameworks and apps, instead of using Apple's Xcode suite.

[11][12] Ant-contrib.unkrig.de[13] implements tasks and types for networking, Swing user interfaces, JSON processing and other.

They use Ant's own and tasks to set up the command lines, and handle all the details of mapping from information in the build file to the program's arguments and interpreting the return value.

It is most commonly used with Windows, Linux, macOS and other Unix operating systems but has also been used on other platforms such as OS/2, OpenVMS, Solaris, HP-UX.

There exist third-party Ant extensions (called antlibs) that provide much of the missing functionality.