They can produce the same result but they do it in different ways and require you to express it in different ways. Make has you describe a graph of outputs and

They can produce the same result but they do it in different ways and require you to express it in different ways. Make has you describe a graph of outputs and how to produce them. It then traverses the graph to produce the requested output. Bash is just a regular sequence of commands, with functions and loops if you wish. If the pipeline you need to run can easily be turned into a dependency graph, I think make is a great fit. It's easy to use, comes with most of what you need built in and has some fun extras, like -jXXX, which allows you to parallelise things and built in caching so you don't regenerate the same asset twice if you don't need to. You can do all that in bash but you'll have to write it yourself, which takes time you could spend on other things.