# Gradle Build Tool Reviews **Vendor:** Gradle **Category:** [Build Automation Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/build-automation) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 38 ## About Gradle Build Tool Gradle Build Tool is the most popular build tool for open source JVM projects on GitHub. It is downloaded on average more than 25 million times per month and has been counted in the Top 20 Most Popular Open Source Projects for IT by Techcrunch. Many popular projects have migrated from Maven to Gradle, with Spring Boot being a prominent example. ## Gradle Build Tool Reviews ### 1. So standard and unlikely to break I haven't had to look into it until today **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Health, Wellness and Fitness | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 24, 2023 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** So standard and unlikely to break I haven't had to look into it until today **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** it broke today, forcing me to look into it. Normally it is so unlikely to break I haven't had to look into it until today **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Android app builds ### 2. Fast, powerful build tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Balaji K. | Principle Member of Technical Staff, Telecommunications, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 07, 2022 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Gradle is a very powerful build tool in circumstances, especially where multi-level projects need to be developed. The underlying DSL language makes it easier to configure and use **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Nothing much on the negative side. One problem on earlier days was the lag of documentation. But it is no more a valid point nowadays, It is considered the latest than old traditional build tools like ant, maven etc., **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Highly recommend espcialy if you are developing cloud native, CI/CD integrated environement **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building applications is one of the pain point in application development life cycle. Gradle build tool helps to overcome the difficulty of making application builds. It also helps in CI/CD integrations ### 3. Gradle Enterprise and Gradle Review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris H. | Director, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2022 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** The ability for the tool to handle builds for any language out there. Allows a single build tool for consistency. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** The flexiblity introduces multiple ways to handle different things like uploading artifacts. Would love to see some more standards there. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** It's worth the effort to do but make sure you have buy in from your development team. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Reduces the complexity from maven and multiple pom files to a single build file. Also allows for consistency across projects no matter the architecture and languages used. ### 4. Gradle is fantastic for java builds **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tiffany L. | Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 10, 2022 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** How simple it is to write a script in Gradle and it does everything behind the scenes. You only have to define the dependencies in a build file, setup the files in a format that Gradle will recognize and run the build command and bam you have a build. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** It isn't versatile. It is very difficult to build other languages with Gradle. It is really Java specific. If you do want to build other programming languages with grade be prepared for complex build scripts. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Seriously consider this when building using Java. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** The ability to have simple maintainable build scripts. It is easy to get started and out of the box tool which lowers the learning curve. It has built in commands for both building and testing Java code. ### 5. Better than Ant/Maven, slower than Bazel **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ken Y. | Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 07, 2021 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Gradle is a much better build system than Ant on Android for folks who remember that 🙂 It's also much better than writing Maven pom.xml files for the same reason of no XML to wade through. You can write your own DSL and plugins to make it even more expressive. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** The Kotlin version built into the DSL never gets updated quickly enough, so you often write kotlin DSL in an older version of kotlin than your project code. Gradle builds can be slow when you get over 500-1000 modules. Caching is not as fast as Bazel. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using Gradle on a very large Android project with 650+ modules. The Kotlin DSL with custom plugins makes build files much more expressive. It's also easy to set up custom tasks and walk the dependency tree. **Official Response from Justin Reock:** > Thanks Ken, we really appreciate the review, and we're always working to improve! ### 6. A powerful tool for managing your builds **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 04, 2022 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Building a project scales up in complexity very quickly. While small Hello World applications might be easy to manage, large multifaceted projects require a robust tool. Gradle is that tool. It handles a lot of the complications of building, including dependency management, configuring toolchains, and integrating custom build logic (just to highlight a few of the things that it does). **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Complexity. Gradle has a very steep learning curve, and even after using it for over 8 years, there's is still more for me to learn. It is a very broad tool, and a lot of components are iterated on rapidly. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Gradle for all of our JVM builds, but it has been the most beneficial for our Android app. Android has a very complicated toolchain, but Gradle significantly simplifies it. It helps that Gradle is the officially supported build tool of Android. ### 7. Best in class build automation tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Danny T. | Senior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 07, 2021 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Gradle's work avoidance, caching, incremental support are capabilities unmatched by many tools. It's dependency management features are unparalleled. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Gradle is JVM centric so it can be difficult to drive adoption with Polyglot teams with bias against Java. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Gradle builds our over 3,500 Java projects supporting more than 900 engineers. We could not be successful without the flexibility of its dependency management features. **Official Response from Justin Reock:** > Thanks so much, Danny, we appreciate your support as always! ### 8. Great tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dwayne E. | Senior System Administrator, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2021 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Fast build of android application that I use for DJI drones **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** I am still testing the tool with some app that I am working on **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Yes, I would recommend it to others **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** No, problems **Official Response from Justin Reock:** > Thanks Dwayne for the review, sounds like very interesting work! ### 9. Gradle ftw! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2021 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** The simplicity of having the build tool do all the work for you :-). In particular, the build scans help with teammate debugging sessions. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** With Android, sometimes the builds can be slow, but this isn't always Gradles fault, though it looks that way! :-) **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building Android projects. Benefits come from the custom plugin creation and not having to repeat yourself. We're more productive because of it. **Official Response from Justin Reock:** > Thanks so much for the feedback and support, Gradle users ftw too! :) ### 10. Gradles is a great tool for Android developers **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michelle W. | Intermediate Business Analyst, Strategic Portfolio Office, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 14, 2020 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Gradle serves as a great integration tool and its allows for quick deployments. It is a great option when you're building Java applications! It is a simple tool and easy to understand, more for beginners. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** It was hard to use Gradle with certain web applications and I feel like it is still in the immature stages of being developed. Hard to switch from Maven to Gradle but its a good starting option. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** It makes developing Java applications easier and it has great customization options! ### 11. The best build tool ever. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Program Development | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 17, 2019 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** I am an IT sector specialist, I have been using the Gradle software more than 3 years, I really like this application because it is very good tool to build up the application. It uses the cashes of the built libraries and every time it is not building the entire application and it is free charge to use.. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** As I mentioned that I am an IT sector specialist, and more or less I have enough experience to see the constraints of the Gradle. What I really do not like on this tool it sometimes uses the old cashes and it may affect your productivity. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** I really recommend the people who would like to use the Gradle for the building. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use the Gradle for my daily purposes in order to build the main body of the application. ### 12. Takes a long while to complete Gradle builds in Android Studio **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tony W. | Founder, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 25, 2016 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** I like that Gradle integrates all my Android 3rd party packages automatically while in my IDE Android Studio. I also like that Gradle handles all the command line statements needed without me having to know what to run in my Android command line. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** I didn't really like the fact that Gradle often took a long time to run its automated builds, such as when first opening an Android project. It often took upwards of 20-30 minutes to run each build and it became a significant annoyance when building and opening my Android projects. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Beware of long build times. You can use Gradle if you can multitask easily using another instance of Android Studio or another workstation, but if you are stuck with one instance, your efficiency may be impacted. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am building a prototype Android app using Android Studio with Gradle integration. I've realized some benefits in using Gradle in the fact that it does all the command line stuff for me, but I think the benefits don't necessarily outweigh the drawbacks. ### 13. Gradle for configuration **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 08, 2019 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Gradle is better than maven for configurations control **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Need to remember the tasks for gradle to execute **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Great tool **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Configuration management ### 14. Compile and Build Microservices in seconds **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Media Production | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 20, 2018 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Very fast compilation which is incremental and build time **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** The rules for inclusion or exclusion and the configuration steps with different versions **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Use it, configure the projects and its one time effort after that you will find lots of time being saved and more focus on development and fixes. The time is saved. Though the repository indirectly is same as m2 of maven but still its an added advantage to save time. The repositories can be accessed via link and hence you can point to your on premise library center or the cloud. And here comes one more advantage : Gradle is a dependency programming tool which also means it's a programming tool. With Gradle you can execute any random task in your setup and Gradle. All declared dependencies are properly and timely executed and the code can spread across many directories. Even you can add tasks to be executed and have testing suites be added in the system. So all configurations are handled at one place and gradle does that. Unlike Ant and Maven is very easy to learn as well. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Creating microservices projects. Very fast build and compile time and all the files can easily be added from local on premise repository to maven repositories. The time saved helps more number of testing cycles and fixing bugs. ### 15. Great build tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 01, 2019 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** a) easy to understand and easy to include dependencies. b) It's quite simple to write an additional plugin if that's necessary c) Provides support for Groovy d) The gradle wrapper is awesome because it allows to use Gradle without installing it **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** I really could not find any cons of using gradle. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use gradle to build jars for java microservices. Writing task is so easy . This replaced maven. ### 16. Best Build tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 14, 2017 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** One of the best available build tools for Android development. You can write custom tasks required in your build. Easy to configure build according to specific business requirement. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Takes a bit long time to build and memory hungry. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Configured with jenkins to automate the builds for dev and testing ### 17. Best build tool for Java and other JVM based languages **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sarneet C. | Software Developer Intern, Management Consulting, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 07, 2016 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Gradle is the best automatic build tool available in market at this moment. Its easy to add dependencies, apply pugins. Its completely automated and provides option of multi module builds. Much more easy to use than ANT or Maven, supports finalizers, dry runs and it builds automatically when source changes. Its available in all major IDEs like intellij idea, Eclipse etc through plugins. Moreover, POM metadata is supported. SO bye bye ugly xml dependency declaration and hello compile' .. .' **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** There is nothing to dislike except the speed of build. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to download the dependencies and if network connection ids interrupted, it stays in that state for a very long time. There must be some mechanism to determine loss of connectivity. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Just go for it. Gradle is definitely suited for beginners and advanced developers alike. Easily Modularize your apps and understand your dependencies better. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Gradle is used in my every single Java and Android project that i have created. It has helped me organize my dependencies in one place in an easy to read build.gradle file. I have modularized my apps with the help of gradle. ### 18. Gradle is the next generation build system for JVM applications **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arbi A. | Concepteur/Développeur, Telecommunications, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 21, 2016 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Unlike similar build tools in JVM ecosystem, Gradle does use XML but rather a flexible DSL based on the Groovy programming language. This leads to a short and clean build configuration files. In addition, Gradle is the de facto build tool for Android which means it has a wide adoption. Also, Gradle DSL is designed to solve divers problems that face developers as part of the software life cycle like: compilation, testing, static analysis, packaging and deployment. Thus, it integrates easily with continuous delivery workflows. Furthermore, Gradle support a parallel execution mode which may speed up it's tasks. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Gradle learning curve is more demanding than other build tools, and there it needs some special preparation to start using it. For most Java projects, Maven works just fine so some people will not bother switching to another build tool with a completely different approach. Gradle is flexible, it allows to script anything but this means for large teams it will be harder to maintain a standard workflow (test, build, delivery). **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** If you're building Android applications, Gradle is a must to have as it is the defacto build system. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was first introduced to Gradle, few years ago, as part of the Android software development when Gradle become the officially supported build system. Before Grandle, building Android applications was painful as it was mostly manual or the through the IDE. Though there was a maven plugin but was a community project and not a long term supported. After Grandle become the build system for Android the gain in productivity was huge, testing and packaging applications become a very easy task. ### 19. Great Product **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chaitanya A. | Software Development Engineer, Internet, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 25, 2016 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** This product is the best i have encountered till now. Gradle integrates with everything that I use. One of the best things about it that it is tightly integrated with the command line. It provides easy access to run or debug one or more task from console and also streamlines the output also. Gradle automatically detects changes in Gradle files and updates the project structure accordingly. The dependency analyser is also a plus one for it as lists resolved dependencies, shows conflicts and allows dependencies to be upgrade when newer versions are available. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Apart from all the features it provides, it really gets slow when you try to build large projects. I don't know about the new version but the performance speed could be improved. I heard that it is improved in the recent version. One more issue I faced with Gradle is lack of native support for reusing ivy.xml (and ivysettings.xml), despite the fact that Gradle actually uses Ivy as its dependency engine. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Go head for it. If your requirement is build automation, then gradle is a very good solution to your problem probably the best. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using gradle for build automation. This way, it helps in increment builds of my software. There are different alternates but I found gradle much more stable and more popular for build automation. With few tweaks , it is the product that you need. ### 20. Eases the setup of a Java project, powerful, problems can be difficult to fix **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Makes building Java projects very easy, and relative to other tools, such as Ant, Gradle is much easier to read. It is also typically easy to get Gradle to agree with what you are trying to do, but can on occasion be fussy. Having migrated from using plain old Ant files, using Gradle has made working with Java projects much easier than it was before. Adding thirdparty libraries, for instance, is much easier to do and understand. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** While Gradle is powerful and flexible, when there are issues they can be difficult to understand at first, and on more than one occasion I found it easier to just blow away a project and rebuild it again in a different directory, as it is typically easier to start fresh and not make mistakes than to fix made errors. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Gradle is used as our Java build tool, first when we were using Eclipse, and then after when we switched to Android Studio. Gradle makes it easy to build projects for either of these environments. In addition the use of Gradle makes it possible to create build scripts for testing environments. ### 21. Easy to learn build system **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marcel V. | Software Engineer, Internet, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** I really liked that it was easy to learn gradle, and also easy to get up and running **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** What I disliked was that whenever I had to troubleshoot build errors, the output from gradle was meaningless or ambiguous at best, it was rarely useful. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Be aware that whenever you get errors you need to debug, and the error is in the gradle code itself, it will be difficult to interpret **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** We switched from ant to gradle, and it was definitely a huge improvement over ant, as we could actually read the gradle builds, as opposed to the ant files, which are huge spaghetti messes. ### 22. Best tool for building Java projects **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sahil S. | Research Intern, Higher Education, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 20, 2016 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Its the de-facto build system for Android. We use it everyday and its very useful since it can be installed on machine without Android studio and still compile apps. There are a lot of plugins available which is the real stregth and it integrates with Maven too which makes it a better choice than Maven. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** It can get slow for large builds. As the size of the Android app grows, it tends to become slow. The main reason is that it uses Groovy instead of XML which makes it slow but leads to short scripts which is helpful. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Gradle as de-facto build tool for our Android app which is quite large. It integrates seamlessly with Eclipse and Android Studio. It integrates well with Jenkins and therefore, we use it for continous delivery which is the main benefit. ### 23. Gradle: The parts of Ant you want, the parts of Maven you need **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Corneil d. | Chief Architect, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 17, 2015 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Gradle is the most powerful build tool ever. On top of being powerful it is easy to make Gradle do what you want. It is easy to understand by novices and they usually can't believe how simple it is. The hallmark of a good model is that you are not surprised when you see the model in action. Gradle is the same way, Modelling a build is very intuitive. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Gradle is moving faster than what most IDE projects can. There is a current gap in Eclipse because the original Gradle plugin is not being actively developed anymore and Eclipse Buildship is still behind and not supporting Eclipse WTP. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Convertign to Gradle is quicker than what most people even think is possible. Even if you have an old legacy project. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** One of the projects I contributed to has over 400 modules in a huge codebase. Their full build was about an hour and the average build after checkins was about 20min. We now have a full build that is about 10min quicker and an average build of 2 minutes. The team gets quicker feedback and they are working towards full test coverage with unit testing. Another improvement is a reduction in the amount of time a developer takes to get a local development environment up and running. ### 24. Slow, bulky, and the only major alternative for Android development **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2016 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Google is doing most of the Android build development in Gradle. ant is no more. maven is no more. At least one project has Google's backing. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Slow and bulky. Even something as simple as "gradle clean" can take a minute. In an atypical Java fashion, its over-architected. Its DSL is unintuitive for Java developers. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** It's definitely slow. Once you get used to that, everything else is fine. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building Android apps. ### 25. Love gradle, use it for all of my java and groovy projects **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joshua C. | Dev, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 17, 2015 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** I like the ability to develop custom gradle tasks and the automatic integration with tools like intellij IDE. The gradle daemon was a nice addition too for speeding up build tasks. I also like the plugin feature where I can add specific features as needed. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** The first build of a project can take a long time as it downloads dependencies and libraries. Also being able to set the java version would be nice too. Documentation is a bit light, and am a bit confused about the various stages of the build cycle ( like whether a tasks is in setup or build ) **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Try it out on a small project first, and see if it works for you. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building company java projects and deploying production applications in a dependable way. ### 26. Build automation for several projects **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Food Production | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 26, 2016 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** I like Gradle for being an Open Source project that makes it really easy to manage native builds, unlike other tools like Ant and Maven, which are designed to work only with Java projects. Gradle is very flexible. Also Gradle's code is much more readable that other solution's. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** At first it took me some time to get used to Gradle, but I wouldn't say it has a steep learning curve. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Gradle can be used with many different project types. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have used Gradle to automate the build for several projects. ### 27. Positive experience with Gradle used for shipping Android Apps **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 28, 2016 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Automation and integration of DevOPs toolchain. The build programming language is flexible and incisive. Short build times and uniform build scripts. Easy release process. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Issues with Gradle and IDE integration with multiple modules. They are not present in multi-module mode. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Highly recommended for users developing android projects ( single build tool for multiple languages ). **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Build Automation, continuous delivery, dependency resolution in applications. ### 28. Incredibly powerful build system, definitely a major improvement over Ant and Maven **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jonathan Y. | Senior Software Engineer - OpenShift, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 16, 2015 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Gradle positions itself as a build tool somewhere between Ant (very explicit, simple, customizable, but difficult to optimize) and Maven (convention over configuration, not very customizable, but with neat optimization features like incremental and parallel builds). Gradle provides all the power of Maven including integration with both Maven and Ivy repositories. It also allows integration with Ant (i.e. calling tasks from your Gradle build). It has a DSL that allows you to create your build *only* with configuration, but lets you customize it using Groovy where you need. This makes it a lot easier than Maven, which requires that you write a plugin (very few people ended up doing this in practise) or embed Ant scripts in your configuration. There has been a lot of great work for improving performance, and the out-of-the-box plugin ecosystem is fantastic (lots of support for test tools, native compiler toolchains, Android, basically all the shiny new toys). **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Gradle is moving very quickly, and from release to release, it could well be that a feature you've come to depend on has been deprecated. It can be hard to keep up if you adopt now (even at 2.x, you're still a bit of an early adopter - they move quickly!) If you're happy with Maven, then you will be very happy with Gradle since you likely don't have /too/ much customization in your build and you'll feel right at home. The conventions are similar, except programmatically inspecting your model is waaaay easier (ever tried fiddling with Maven profiles?) If you're transitioning from Ant, there's a bit of a learning curve involved with writing your build scripts if you want best performance (you want to be declarative, not imperative, thus allowing the Gradle runtime to figure out possibly-more-optimal ways to do things). You can still write things imperatively if you really want - Gradle gives you some rope to hang yourself with - but you really shouldn't (hence the unfortunate learning curve). The incubating features like parallel/multithreaded builds and configure-on-demand are pretty useful for larger projects, and if you structure things correctly, your project will build very fast (if not, you can run the profile tool to figure out the slow steps). One difficulty is transitioning some legacy projects to Gradle if there's been a lot of customization. It can be difficult to completely rewrite the builds for large monolithic builds, so it would be helpful to have a strategy for partially converting builds (i.e. invoke a Maven build from Gradle). It may already be possible to do this, I haven't looked too deeply. But in general it's a good strategy to transition parts of the build piece-by-piece. Another challenge is the exception messages and errors can be hard to understand - though this should be improving with the new Managed Model system, which gives Gradle more insight into your build. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Give it a try, but persevere with it and make sure you read through all the documentation. The user guide is okay, the forums are insightful, and the API docs are a great reference. The user guide is a good start but is unfortunately (probably due to the fast-moving nature of Gradle) incomplete. You will need to be comfortable on the bleeding edge if you adopt at this time, but it's very exciting! Also be sure to take advantage of the Gradle Wrapper feature. It ensures that you can use the latest and greatest features without having requiring your whole team to manually update. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're building several Java projects. Usual challenges include managing dependencies, integration with our CI system, running tests, static code analysis, etc. Gradle has lots of plugins which have been fantastic (JaCoCo for code coverage, JUnit/TestNG for testing, PMD/FindBugs and other static code analysis tools...) ### 29. The Best Build Tool for Android **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Apparel & Fashion | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Easy setup, the ability to automate production builds, making flavor, adding dependencies is very easy **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** The long build time it takes when in online mode. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Gradle is a great build tool for android and Java-based frameworks like Spring. Languages built on top of JVM like kotlin also works great with Gradle. Gradle is a must if you're developing around any of these frameworks **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm using it for Android Application Development ### 30. Robust and flexible, but can be a nightmare **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dmitry B. | Senior SDET, Internet, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2015 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Build speed, configuration on demand, incremental builds, dependency resolution, clean syntax. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Infrastructure is not mature enough, sometimes things do not work the way they were designed and you have to spend time researching the problem and searching for a certain combination of plugins and dependencies that actually works. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Highly customizeable, but some features/plugins may not work properly. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** We build a native Android app and we were initially using Maven plugin to build the project. With Maven we have faced some limitations and were forced to migrate to Gradle. Since then we use Configuration on demand and Incremental build features of Gradle and it saves so much time! ### 31. more easy to start a new project **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 17, 2015 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** become more easily to solve the jar dependency ,build project ,package. It also provide many detail docs on how to take use of it for many languages. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** the integration with IDE may not work very well, sometime the project may be missing, need to re-import **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Almost don't worry about the build process and it become more easy for this. It also provide very detail examples for every process/languages. When start-up a new project, it's better to try this. And it will take less time on set up a new project. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** don't worry about the build process. It become more easy for a new project, especially for Start up project/company. ### 32. Gradle is the best build automation tool available. Learn, contribute and grow with it. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Priya A. | Software Development Engineer, Internet, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2015 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** I like writing script in Gradle for build automation over xml in maven. It provides great readability. And because it is scripting based tool, I can write custom tasks which was not so easy with Maven. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** There are two things I would like to see Gradle improving at 1. Availabiity of sufficient documentation and examples I think providing examples for Gradle would be a great help. 2. Adding plugins popular in Maven world. When a maven user migrates to Gradle, unavailability of plugins is the biggest turn off. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Gradle is the best build automation tool available. Contribute to gradle and grow with it. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using gradle, we have been able to create a build automation framework scripts tailored to projects in my organizations. This saves a lot of time while building new projects to get to the CI-CD automation stage. ### 33. Gradle: build tool for tomorrow **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 17, 2015 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** It is very flexible It is fast Gradle Wrapper It is modern It supports many languages / platforms and this number will increase in future It is based on programming language, not on XML configuration **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Groovy is used as a programming language. Dynamic languages has poor support in some IDEs There are many ways to accomplish your needs, dozens of similar plugins on Github. You need to experiment a lot with Gradle It's a bit more complex (due to it's features) than old-style tools like Maven and Ant **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** If you can - start using Gradle in new projects now. Sure, you'll face problems: uploading to maven repos, versioning, releasing, maybe lack of plugins you are familiar with when using Maven. But starting new Project with Gradle is simpler than moving existing build because you can solve problems incrementally, not all of them at once. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm building small- and mid- sized enterprise apps with Gradle. My stack includes: OSGi and Spring (plain old MVC and new Boot) apps. I've used Maven prior Gradle. Moving to Gradle allowed me to create more expressive and clear build files, drastically reduced build file sizes and reduced build time. ### 34. Nice tool for Android development **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrew H. | Co-Founder and Front-End Developer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 16, 2015 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** it's a declarative domain specific language, which makes it really nice to write in. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** I didn't have experience writing in the Groovy style, and felt like I went a long time before properly learning it. It's easy to use Gradle without knowing the language very well, but I would have rather had to a way to quickly learn the language before experimenting. **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Learn it properly first...actually read the documentation. It will be worth it in the long-term! **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was using it to build Android source code. Declarative nature of it was really nice for this. ### 35. Gradle is quite good serves source build needs **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Izzet M. | Solution Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2015 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** Extensibility, plugin system, wrapper capabilities **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Lack of performance, sometimes it's hard to find proper API documentation **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Gradle follows build by conventions, has similar functionality as Maven but with much more greater extensibility **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** source code build, deployment, static code analysis etc ### 36. Gradle Review - Thomas Orth **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tom O. | MIS Intern, Non-Profit Organization Management, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 16, 2015 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** The ease of adding modules to a project and universability **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** The loading time for a project takes a long amount of time on decent computers **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** Very good tool. Would recommend to anyone **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Identifying plane crashes with android apps and learned that the gradle system is better than jar files. I have also learned better code practice ### 37. Build Happiness **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 18, 2015 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** simple rather powerful dsl customize build script easy integrated with other platform **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** not widely used in china, have to study goovy script **Recommendations to others considering Gradle Build Tool:** It's great in most Scenarios! Ant is Powerful but complicated, Maven is better for its standard life cycle, Grade take it all. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** normally android project and java build. sonar integration auto test case execution ### 38. Very good **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 18, 2015 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** The Gradle is simple and easy to use! Great tool. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** The gradle could use a lib declarations more likely with Ruby/Bundler Gemfile. One line to declaration! **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** Yes, I was studying automate tool and Gradle was excellent choice ## Gradle Build Tool Discussions - [Is maven or gradle better?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/gradle-build-tool-is-maven-or-gradle-better) - 1 comment - [Is maven or gradle better?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-maven-or-gradle-better) - 1 comment - [View Gradle Build Tool pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/gradle-build-tool/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-15+01%3A53%3A17+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=a4213ae5-447f-42a9-8f11-b1d848d982dc&secure%5Btoken%5D=3bcd2065c0d050c0e9bfbb70d72d10ffc9fe30c39ed6b9afdbbc8585e6ce86ef&format=llm_user) ## Top Gradle Build Tool Alternatives - [Jenkins](https://www.g2.com/products/jenkins/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (548 reviews) - [Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/red-hat-ansible-automation-platform/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (369 reviews) - [Bamboo](https://www.g2.com/products/bamboo/reviews) - 4.1/5.0 (68 reviews)