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Transbuild brings together several existing ideas into a single useful tool. This section lists some other similar tools, and briefly compares them to Transbuild.
The Java http://www.ananas.org/xm/ XM (XSLT Make) program is similar to Transbuild in taking a source directory of files and building the target Web site pages from it. However, each source XML file is treated individually. It does not have an annotations mechanism, so generating navigation links between the pages is not possible.
The Web Meta Language (WML) http://www.thewml.org/ is similar to Transbuild in that it uses a source file to automatically generate a set of files. Instead of using XSLT, it uses a series of processing steps that combines Perl, M4 and proprietary HTML processing.
Zope, PHP, JSP, AxKit, Cocoon, are tools that many Web developers have heard of. However, they are in a different category from Transbuild because they require a server to be installed and/or the content to be stored in a specific database or format. You cannot build and test the site locally without the server. Some of the tools need low level programming and integration to get a working site up and running.