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Because it can be run on the command line, ad hoc. Make -j is great for pre-existing command lists and dependencies. But as the man page describes, parallel is like xargs, which I use all the time on the command line for ad hoc actions (frees me from having to write a bash loop).

make requires a Makefile, whereas one can pass parameters directly to parallel.

There also seems to be a few more options revolving around job success/failure and how to react -- a) ignore failed jobs and report how many at the end, b) cleanly exit as soon as a job fails and c) stop all jobs as soon as one fails.

Those (a) (b) and (c) points sound like strengths of make, to me.

Sorry, those were features of parallel, not make (unless I'm mistaken).

See: http://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/man.html#differences_be...

parallel is intended to work on arbitrary commands.

So is make.

It can, but that was not its intended purpose. That is, you can figure out a way to map your task to a dependency hierarchy and save it to a Makefile, but why do that when you could use something designed for that?