What's a good build tool (Make) for web developers?

I use make, Makefile for C code and I'm familiar with the syntax. Unfortunately Make's best used on single directories as in, one Makefile/directory.

In web development, I often have a whole bunch of directories that I'm working in and I then need to build a target/ folder and upload that to the server. So, here I may need to minify the code stored in a tree html/ and copy to target/.

Make isn't the right tool for this sort of work - what is? Ideally I'd like to use it with C, Python, C++ as well.