hoe vs rake: What are the differences?

Developers describe hoe as "Hoe is a rake/rubygems helper for project Rakefiles". Hoe is a rake/rubygems helper for project Rakefiles. It helps you manage, maintain, and release your project and includes a dynamic plug-in system allowing for easy extensibility. Hoe ships with plug-ins for all your usual project tasks including rdoc generation, testing, packaging, deployment, and announcement. See class rdoc for help. Hint: ri Hoe or any of the plugins listed below. For extra goodness, see: http://docs.seattlerb.org/hoe/Hoe.pdf. On the other hand, rake is detailed as "Rake is a Make-like program implemented in Ruby". Rake is a Make-like program implemented in Ruby. Tasks and dependencies are specified in standard Ruby syntax. Rake has the following features: * Rakefiles (rake's version of Makefiles) are completely defined in standard Ruby syntax. No XML files to edit. No quirky Makefile syntax to worry about (is that a tab or a space?) * Users can specify tasks with prerequisites. * Rake supports rule patterns to synthesize implicit tasks. * Flexible FileLists that act like arrays but know about manipulating file names and paths. * Supports parallel execution of tasks.

hoe and rake can be primarily classified as "RubyGems Packages" tools.

hoe and rake are both open source tools. rake with 1.97K GitHub stars and 576 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than hoe with 270 GitHub stars and 64 GitHub forks.