Writing of BitBake recipes is more easy and more intuitive than writing Makefiles while providing higher flexibility. This allows you to tweak specific recipes for your very special needs and to add new recipes very fast. You can build toolchains, Software Distribution Kits (SDKs), complete Distributions or just single packages. The flexibility of OpenEmbedded allows you to reuse the once written recipes for many different purposes. OpenEmbedded provides everything buildroot will be able to provide. But in contrast to buildroot OpenEmbedded will allow you to achieve what you really want to achieve. You can add new package formats, new filesystems, new output formats easily. OpenEmbedded will suit your need.

Crosstool allows to create toolchains for you. It can only create the initial toolchain for you. It will not compile other needed libraries or applications for you, it will not be able to track dependencies or to package them properly. OpenEmbedded supports all configurations crosstool supports. You can start to create toolchains with OpenEmbedded, then as your needs grow create a more complete SDK from already present base libraries and applications and if you recognize you need to have packages for the target you have them almost built already.

Cross-compilation is a tough business. It is not that cross-compiling is hard itself but many people misuse the buildsystem they use to build their software. This will lead to a variety of issues you can run into. This can be failing tests on configuration because of executing cross compiled binaries or crashes at run-time due wrong sizes of basic types. When utilizing OpenEmbedded you avoid searching for patches at many different places and will be able to get things done more quickly. OpenEmbedded allows you to choose from a pool of ready to use software packages. OpenEmbedded will create complete flashable images using different output formats and filesystems. This allows you to create complete and specialized distributions easily.