First of all, read the Ivy / Maven comparison from the Ivy website. The key information:
First, the most important difference is that they aren't at all the same kind of tools. Apache Maven is a software project management and comprehension tool, whereas Apache Ivy is only a dependency management tool, highly integrated with Apache Ant™, the popular build management tool. So maybe a more interesting comparison would compare Apache Ant+Ivy vs Apache Maven. But this goes beyond the scope of this page which concentrates on dependency management only.
Ivy adds dependency management functionality to Ant, so really, the question in terms of what build system you use is either:
- use Ivy/Ant
- migrate to Maven
If your build is already using Ant, Ivy will be an easier transition since your build scripts don't need to be ported to a different build system.
If you decide to transition to Maven it will require more effort, because you need to rewrite your build scripts and Mavenize everything as well as configure your dependency management.
It will also be easier to port your dependency management configuration from Ivy/Ant to Maven if you ever decide to go in that direction. So Ivy dependency management would be a good stepping stone for in the long term for going to a Maven configuration.
