In my opinion Absolutely Maven. Maven isnt just a build tool, but a project's life-cycle Management tool. you have the control of the project's dependencies, deployments, versions, documentations, tests. Maven provides a declarative way to especify the project with the pom.xml files, where you declare WATH you wanna do for the project, not HOW. Maven takes care of the rest (find your libs and put in the right place). I recommend you to take a look at the maven guide for more informations.