--- title: Grails Reviews meta_title: 'Grails Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 33 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Grails works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 3.6 review_count: 33 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-06-21' parent_category: name: Web Frameworks url: https://www.g2.com/categories/web-frameworks --- # Grails Reviews **Vendor:** The Grails Project **Category:** [Java Web Frameworks](https://www.g2.com/categories/java-web-frameworks) **Average Rating:** 3.6/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 33 ## About Grails A powerful Groovy-based web application framework for the JVM ## Grails Reviews ### 1. Grails is Awesome Framwork **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mahfuz A. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 15, 2023 **What do you like best about Grails?** Easy and fast development Open Source Big form and huge supportive resources Compatible with the latest Spring and Java Easy to deploy in production Easy multitenant integration Easy-to-use web pages (GSP) **What do you dislike about Grails?** Less community than others Heavyweight as there are a lot of wrappers **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Very easy to write a web application in a few hours. ### 2. Grails work like magic **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Accounting | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 28, 2021 **What do you like best about Grails?** My favorite map component, Json, params. Mapping works are more fun than anything else. Cron Job is one of my favorite jobs. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Disli didn't get anything to do. The deeper I going, the more I fall in love. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** many types of business problem doing solved. Develop a third-party application for client sites and connect with mine applications. Then working with multi-threading. Clicksend's email, postal mail, voice mail, text messaging service has been created a new service. ### 3. Not so holly grails anymore **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kazik P. | Creative Technologist / Software Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 28, 2021 **What do you like best about Grails?** Grails was designed to give the power of Ruby on Rails programming style to Java developers. This model means extremely fast prototyping of web user interfaces based on domain model. It was not possible to achieve it in pure Java though, therefore Grails is based on Groovy, which added lots of cool features at the time: dynamic invocations, closures, more functional programming style. While staying on JVM, Groovy can still benefit from all the Java libraries already available on the market. **What do you dislike about Grails?** The competitive advantages of Grails seem to fade over time. Ruby on Rails is not that popular anymore, since dynamic web applications are rather executing their logic browser side (react), than server side. Also features of Groovy, like closures, are effectively replaced by lambdas in Java 8, syntactic sugar of Doman Specific Languages in Kotin, and evolution of spring framework components like spring-boot. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Grails was used as a base technology in the startup I was working on. It allowed us to easily translate business requirements into domain model, with minimal verbosity. Such a model was shared between several teams as a common vocabulary. It would be hard to achieve it without Grails. But it also resulted in terribly monolit software architecture over time, which was very difficult to untangle. Therefore we started to slowly phase out our Gradle monolit with small microservices. I would still consider using Gradle for a very small project, like a custom database with interface. It can be prototyped in Gradle in minutes. ### 4. worked with grails for 3 years **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 29, 2021 **What do you like best about Grails?** language similarity with java and platform structure **What do you dislike about Grails?** additional dependencies that come along with grails **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** developed saas applications for b2b verticals ### 5. Grails scripting experience **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ragavi K. | Contractor, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2019 **What do you like best about Grails?** One of the best scripting languages that I have ever used for automation purposes in my real time projects. It is more flexible , more object oriented, aligned with Java **What do you dislike about Grails?** No there is nothing that I dislike on groovy on Grails. It has given me immense pleasure using it in real time projects **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was able to embed Java code as is. I was also able to connect to database as is with the Java code, re use most from the Java world ### 6. Convention over configuration **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 31, 2018 **What do you like best about Grails?** The easiest to learn framework. Base on Groovy, it's an easy to grasp framework if you have some Java experience. Additionally, its convention over configuration logic, let you create applications on the fly **What do you dislike about Grails?** Grails does a lot of magic in the background for you, but sometimes you that's the reason for unexpected errors **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Grails uses Spring's feature and Hibernate under the hood. So a developer with experience on these, will get speed very easy **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our entire application is based on Grails ### 7. Best framework to for APIs and every component is isolated and connected in best way **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 09, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Every things is configurable and each component is in perfect isolation with other. If implemented properly - this is the best framework. **What do you dislike about Grails?** other ORM support and application monitoring tool which will ensure best practice is implemented **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** The development cycles will be short - please check the post deployment behaviour on stage before going into production. Some times there CPU spikes despite writing best possible code. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** worked in food-tech and BFS products and benefit is that you just get started with the framework - if an experience person is using this, then he/she will understand the luxury of coding in Grails compared to other frameworks. ### 8. Grails is easy to start, hard to deep in. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Liangliang Z. | 开发主管, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 29, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** 0. Can use any existed java library. 1. Groovy 's advantage (than java): (0) Metaprogramming (1) more efficient operators ( Elvis operator, Safe navigation operator etc. ) (2) more useful method to JDK classes ( such as Collection#find()), more (3) can use much DSL ( can do same things with less code) 2. GORM is the bettern than using mybatis/hibernate in java app development. 3. easy to conver between map,list and json,xml. 4. Gsp is better than jsp——but I more intend not to use both at all. Instead, Grails app should response json data only. Html page can be developed by another app (using sass, angularJs, gulpjs etc), using ajax or jsonp to access json data. **What do you dislike about Grails?** 0. Most grails's plugin not better enough, less actived, lack document, obsoleted. e.g. : (1) I prefer to use RestTemplate,UriComponentsBuilder provided by SpringFramework —— which is simple enough, solid, can be used in both java and groovy, rather than Grails REST Plugin (2) I don't think using spring security plugin is better than using Spring Security framework directly in resources.groovy —— Because , beside to learn Spring Security framework , I had to lean the plugin too (for debuging problems). Maybe, it should focus on Spring Security's extension, not the configuration? 1. Easy to start, hard to deep in. Grails's wrapped much known Java libray, framework —— such as Spring framework, Spring security, etc。Without much knowledge about Spring Security, I don't think a java/grails beginner can well config the plugin. Only those who had famillar JVM, the libraries Grails used, can play around Grails. 2. Grails 2's build mechanism (Gant, but Grails 3 is using gradle) 3. Grails 2's plugin mechanism (Still studying Grails 3) PS: I also quested what about using Spring Boot + Groovy + GORM (without Grails) —— since most grails module has announced it can be used outside Grails. I'am more familiar SpringFramework. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Electronic Commerce. Make a java/Grails beginner who focus business logic can start development quickly. ### 9. Huge addition to the JVM world **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mathias F. | Senior Software Engineer, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** I've used Grails for various projects. From full web oriented architectures, to RESTful APIs, even for console applications. Its Convention over Configuration nature makes it extremely quickly to get started with any project and just modify what you need from the initial sensible defaults. Personally, coming from JEE, where you have to edit thousands of XMLs and properties files, it was awesome. Groovy is a very powerful and comfortable language. If you come from Java, you'll find yourself loving it right away. Before choosing Grails, I considered Ruby on Rails, but didn't like having to learn a completely new and wheel-reinventing language. Grails has everything RoR and many other frameworks has, using a familiar language and industry proven backing technologies. **What do you dislike about Grails?** As the community is not as big as others, the documentation is sometimes a bit scarce. Many times I had to fix things by myself, even checking Grails source code and making pull requests to the core team. The plugin ecosystem has the same problem, there are not so many plugins as other frameworks have. I, however, see those disadvantages as some kind of challenge. I love contributing to the community and here there is plenty of room for collaboration. Sometimes having too much is also bad, like Node.js, where you have a hundred ways of doing anything and none of those ways are completely correct. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Use version 2.x, because version 3.x is still very unstable. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** My company used to have a .NET solution that became obsolete and impossible to refactor. I was hired to conduct a migration of the whole system to Grails framework. The learning curve of the developers was very low as they soon starting to see advantages (in the language and in the framework). Things that used to take hundreds of lines of code, were soon replaced with a couple of lines with Groovy's dynamic nature. As per the architecture, it's really easy to design a solution on top of Grails' MVC pattern. The design, frontend and core team work with very little conflict in the same project. ### 10. Grails is very good for web-application development **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tuomas V. | Software Developer, Telecommunications, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Groovy: It is easy to process web data with groovy since its allow dynamic typing. Strong typing is good for making control structure more realiable Gorm makes it very easy to manipulate and fetch data from database and its intuitive to use Running environments (test,prod,dev, custom) makes it very easy to apply different behaviour for the system when its on test, production or development or in continunous integration. Plugin system and dependency management is very powerful way to control the dependencies of your project. Java-nature: Environment is the same in all the servers no matter if you deploy in windows or linux (different distros) Java-nature: Application is alive even if there is no page load, like in php. Threading makes it easy to manage background tasks without cronjob. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Testing literally sucks in my grails 1.3.9. I have tryd upgrading it few times but it is a lot of work. IntelliJ suns the tests smoothly inside the IDE but free iDEs like netbeans just displays grails console output and i have to read the reports to see what actually failed and why. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Intranet applications for health care companies. Creating new features as MVC is very easy to solve with grails. ### 11. Develop powerful web applications fast and easy **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rubén S. | Senior software engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** If you come from Java/Spring the learning curve is quite flat. Grails is based on the concept of "convention over configuration" so if you follow the conventions you get rid of a lot of messy XML files. Apart from this, you have all the power of the Groovy programming language, a much more modern language than Java, that allow the developer to build the business logic in a much more intuitive way. As a summary, when you start to develop with Grails and you see that you have your environment and a running application in 15 minutes you won't leave this framework. **What do you dislike about Grails?** One of the strengths of Grails is as well one of it's weaknesses. Grails can be extended via plugins, that are very useful to add integration with new functionalities, for example Spring-security, LDAP, etc. but sometimes there are so many plugins for one task that you have to choose carefully because some of them only work for specific versions, others are unmaintained, and this can be a problem. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** If you come from Java/Spring/Hibernate world and you want to start a new project give Grails a try, you will be surprised of how fast the things can be built. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** I work as software developer in a big travel agency, developing the call center tools / middle office tools. Using Grails we have been able to short the development time, being able to replace an old set of tools with a new tools with all the functionalities integrated in less than a year. As a note some of the developers didn't have experience using Grails but they have become very productive in a very short amount of time. ### 12. My go-to Java web framework **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lee B. | New Zealand Technical Lead, Financial Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Working in groovy is great, so much less code! Grails has come a long way since I was a committer on it several years ago. The MVC structure is very easy to understand and the wide range of plugins make its quick to get projects going. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Keeping up to date with the best practice/best plugins can be challenging as the framework has changed a lot in the last few major versions. I also find it hard to stay disciplined in keeping my GSP DRY and not repeating a lot of common code. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Make sure you read the up to date documentation for your version and check that any online guids/tutorials/plugins are applicable to the latest version. Try to reduce duplication in your GSP by using the forms/bean-fields plugins. Also take a good like at resources pipeline stuff for managing/minifying JS and CSS. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use it for internal administration application for our public facing system. It's foundation in Spring and Hibernate meant we could re-use a lot of our application data model code to quickly build administration screens. ### 13. Working with grails for my own startup without any experience on web development was a charm. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ejaz A. | Sr. Software Development Engineer, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** The best part of Grails is GORM. GORM uses easy to learn and readable DSL to for interaction with Data Bases. Writing queries in GORM DSL and implementing relations from ER diagram is as simple as 1 2 3. Certainly GORM is not the only thing I like most. There are many more such as URL mappings, convention over configuration, extensive plugins, grails services and out of the box support for implementing RESTFul web-services. Although we did not use view layer (jsp/gsp) of grails for our web application, we use it extensively for internal applications used to manage our business process. Grails is so easy to use that we ended up creating few internal applications to manage our business process in Grails. Apart from Framework, people behind its development are cooperative and its overall community is quite friendly. At many occasions, my reported issues were fixed within a day or two. Grails release cycle is quite fast, so you don't have to wait for the fixed issues to arrive in next stable release. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Even though grails is feature rich full stack framework there are always room for development. One such example is its support for REST. Grails provide API versioning, response nesting and a lot of cool stuff but does not provide pagination or API meta-data out of the box. Grails response requires alot of customization for a production ready application **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** I would highly recommend grails to startups and entrepreneurs where resources and time are limited. Grails is the right choice for such people. Apart from rapid development, grails deployment and maintenance is also easy. It provides DB migration and schema export features which make it easy to migrate your DB whenever you change an application. One of the best things in Grails is that it provides support for SQL, NoSQL (mongo) and graph based DBs such as neo4j. Grails built in ORM known as GORM make it easy to migrate from SQL to NoSQL and neo4j whenever you need to. Your underlying code does not need any modifications and your queries also remain the same. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are building a supply chain solution using grails REST web-services. Grails provides out of the box support for unit and integration tests based on SPOCK framework. It provides functional test support using Geb. We have automated tests for all of our use cases and we are 4 developers right now. These tests make it easy for us to figure out the side effects of any of code changes. Grails uses gradle build system now and is compatible with almost all of CI/CD tools. Grails app can easily be dockerized using either gradle docker plugin or runnable jars making it suitable for deployment as containers. We use docker containers for our development, testing and production deployment need and all of our stuff is fully automated. ### 14. Developing web application was never so easy **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Uday Pratap S. | Technical Lead, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** It includes all the proven technologies like Spring, Hibernate, Sitemesh etc. It's built Groovy doing things differently is so easy. It gives so many things out of the box for which we tend to create our own solution. The project structure makes it's easy to understand where to put things. Best thing is it's GORM, Geb and Spock testing. Data binding, validations, inbuilt tags and creating own tags makes the life much easier that we tend to do in conventional way. The recent upgrade built on Springboot which makes it much light weight as well. The dynamic scaffoldin feature makes it much easier to do POC and MVP to showcase to clients. Plugin base architecture helps to create smaller services and reusability of code. It has a great community which serves to plugins e.g; integrating spring security is like 2 hours task which makes your development efforts really less. It has a in built capability of serving JSON response so creating rest application is like just adding annotation. **What do you dislike about Grails?** It's a great framework, but it also needs a huge memory to run, this may be fixed with the Grails 3 which comes with Springboot. Second thing is GORM, since GORM provide so much query out of the box but sometimes it fails to meet the expected output may because of GORM bugs or due to hibernate bugs. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** It's really a framework for enterprises. The way development is being done these days writing maintainable code in no time is not so easy task, but Grails gives you predefined structure which helps to keep the code more maintainable. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have created so many web applications in most of the domains like travelling, CMS, Video delivers site, Project management site, affiliate network, e-commerce etc. Grails fits in every situation and every domain. ### 15. Great framework for developing powerful web apps **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Puneet B. | Associate Technical Lead, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** The concept of reusability because of lots of vast number of plugins which would help to get lots things done with in just few minutes, like sms, email, various databases etc. Another, cool things I like about it is the vast community support and some very open and helpful people, which always help me very quickly whenever I am stuck. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Honestly, I don't have any specific dislikes. And with the release of latest 3.x version it's adding more and tools to help build a very scalable applications. But, earlier I thought that it's only for web applications and which is not the case anymore. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am working on Groovy & Grails from past 4 years, and worked on various projects in Healthcare domain, Videos related projects etc. So, I see lots of benefits with Grails: 1. Easily find existing plugins to do the job for me. 2. Quickly get help from the community. 3. I am able focus more on the business perspective of the requirement rather than functional as things are very easy and quick to implement. There are lots of benefits using Grails, I would say one should atleast give it a try or talk to someone in personal who is working with Grails or whose business run on Grails. ### 16. A powerful web framework for Java developers **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Armando P. | Salesian Volunteer, Research, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** I like from Grails the order that the framework provides to your code. It is not just an MVC, but also includes ORM, GSP view technology and a build system. But what I like the best is the possibility to reuse your java-code on your web projects, even if you decide to code using Groovy, you still can use Java libraries on your project. **What do you dislike about Grails?** For some reason I have had really bad times with some plugins conflicts and miss configurations that can take me hours to solve. It can be a total waste of time, over all when you have a tide deadline. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** A good resource to learn about Grails is the book: Grails in Action 2nd Edition If for some reason your app is having a wrong behavior, clean your application using the comand: grails clean **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data base modelling: There is not need to waste time implementing your database structure, GORM does it for you based on your domain model files. ### 17. Easy framework to work with, but does have its downfaills **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tyler W. | Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** The speed at which you can develop is unparalleled in my experience as a full-stack web developer. Convention over configuration is heavily used within Grails and once you start to understand these 'rules' allow rapid development. I like the system they have in place to allow great separation of concerns (Views, Controllers, Services, client-side assets, config files, etc.). The groovy language is a joy to work with compared to traditional Java - some of the built-in methods feel very LINQ-like if you are familiar with C#. These really goes hand-in-hand with Grails GORM database wrapper that allows for terse querying/persistence. A huge plus is that changes to Class files can often be reloaded at runtime which makes development much faster than having to re-compile afterwards (this isn't perfect though). Spring is a huge part of Grails and has been very nicely integrated. **What do you dislike about Grails?** The documentation on many features within Grails is either sparse or nonexistent - many times I will receive an obscure error and dig heavily into old forums or framework source code to understand what is going on. The dynamic nature of Groovy certainly has its pluses but can lead to bad practices by coworkers that make reading code much harder than it needs to. The plugin ecosystem can be a nightmare when it comes to documentation and updates; but there are some gems out there as well (Spring Security, Asset-Pipeline). Grails support does seem to be waning with Spring Source dropping the project. The only IDE that really seems to work with Grails 3+ is IntelliJ ($$) but we are still using GGTS (Eclipse) with Grails 2.4 **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Depending on your needs, Grails could allow for rapid development but you must be willing to work your way through mediocre support to get there. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** I can't go into great detail, but our project involves a large internal website operating under the federal government. Function is more important to us than form. ### 18. Development of IT systems with Grails **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jesús R. | Consultor y líder técnico, Program Development, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Convention over configuration (save time not writing configuration files and keeping everything sorted). Robust technologies under the hood (Spring, Hibernate...). Groovy has advantages over Java (but you can also use plain Java while you master Groovy). Very good for design patterns. Plugin system (Spring Security, Twitter bootstrap...). Scaffold system (with templates you can, and should, edit) You can work from the command line (generate domains classes, controllers, views...) Modular framework: i like GORM, but if you don`t, you are able to remove it (you can even remove Grails and get a standard Spring application). GVM tool (SDKMan right now) to manage framework versions. **What do you dislike about Grails?** During development process the application server starts slowly, and needs a lot of memory. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Easy and quickly way of develop your Java application with Spring MVC, Spring Security, Spring Werbflow, Hibernate. If you have some knowledge in one of the most popular Java application stack (hibernate, spring, bootstrap...), you should try it. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Fast development. Development costs reduce. Better code. Easy to setup and start working in your system. ### 19. Grails offers rapid development with super fast ROI **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** GORM(Groovy object relational mapping) is the feature I love best about grails. It hides away the complexity of hibernate without losing out on any of the power. Combined with the power of scaffolding putting out a proof of concept is a matter of hours not months. **What do you dislike about Grails?** In the earlier versions of grails, maven support was not stellar. This has since been rectified. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** It is an awesome framework which is unfortunately rather unknown to a lot of people. It makes building traditional web apps extremely easy. It is built on the very robust spring and hibernate platforms and is mature and battle tested. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** The grails projects I worked with were in the realm of IoT. I integrated Netty with grails for some custom binary protocol support and used the scaffolding to rapidly churn out proof of concept pages and charts. I was able to get decent plugins for most of the stuff I needed. ### 20. Grails - Easy to Start, A Nightmare to Maintain **Rating:** 0.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Think Tanks | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** It is very easy to start a Grails application and start a web project. If you are unfamiliar with groovy, it has a fairly low learning curve if you have some experience with Java. Grails uses a programming by configuration system, where things must be named a certain way to get the magical grails metaclass interfaces. To do more advanced configuration, the maintainer should be familiar with Spring, as Grails uses Spring beans under its hood. **What do you dislike about Grails?** There are many, many problems. If you use any of the advanced grails options, they are very brittle if not used exactly like designed, will not work at all. Since Grails is using a dynamic language, the framework developer must maintain adequate unit test coverage to make sure that functions are being called correctly. If functions are not called correctly, then dynamic method Exceptions will be thrown all the way up the request stack. The plugin ecosystem is completely un-maintained and plugins are usually out of date and most likely do not work with the version you are using. There were many problems upgrading from grails 1.x to 2.x with completely broken changes. The 2.x to 3.x upgrade also broke many controller systems (we have not figured out our 2.x to 3.x upgrade, due to many issues). The Grails project has reached its end of life, and is no longer being supported by its parent company Spring Source. The GORM ORM for Domain class objects has many anti-patterns; the primary supported of Grails recommends that you do not use the join tables as documented, but instead use explicit join table objects as first class domain classes. Service method implicit transactions will lead to many subtle bugs, even understanding what is going on it will still cause problems. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** If you just started your project, use another framework. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use grails every day as our primary web interface for a complicated web application. We do not have a clear future. ### 21. It is a pleasure to work with grails **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Martín Pablo C. | Ingeniero de software, Program Development, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** The easy of use of advanced features related with spring, the convention over configuration, the groovy language itself. All of that produces a very good piece of code that is easy to understand. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Well sometimes some plugins don't work well when you put them all together and other times when I have some sort of bug I need to do a clean and compile to fix it. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Of course you will need better servers to run it, but it is worh of it. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Web development with relational databases and I am exploring the nosql world and it is very easy to do it with grails. ### 22. Creating web applications and micro services with Grails, ranging from tiny to enterprise grade **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ivo H. | Senior software architect & teamleader, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** - Compared with other Java frameworks, you typically write less then 50% code which vastly improves maintainability - Automatically generated and customizable CRUD pages - Large, complex applications can easily be split up into self-contained sub-applications **What do you dislike about Grails?** Breaking changes between Grails versions; upgrading to a newer version typically requires code changes **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** For modern web applications, I tend to use Grails only as a RESTfull backend (no GSP's) in combination with a React or Angular SPA. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Grails aids in rapid application development and shorter development cycles. Start a new project in just a minute and have the first prototype ready in no time. ### 23. Good framework for rapid applications development **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marcin . | Software Engineer, Outsourcing/Offshoring, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** * convention over configuration * relatively easy to learn * many useful plugins * built on top of mature technologies (Spring, Hibernate) * Groovy-powered **What do you dislike about Grails?** * version 3 is not fully backward compatible * framework development is not so fast anymore, feels a bit forgotten recently **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** I solve many business problems with Grails. Starting from video processing platform to social networks to e-commerce, B2B systems. The main benefits Grails provides me are high developer productivity and flat learning curve for new devs. ### 24. Grails review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** I love the conventional approach to web application development that Grails brought. Grails gives you a very simple "interface" to the complicated components that underly it, such as Hibernate, Spring, and some template engine, for example. It does a good job of finding the sweet spot between making it very simple/fast to do common things, and not-so-difficult to do more specialized things. Grails is similar to Rails - in fact it was inspired by Rails. I loved the unit-testing support provided by the framework. It is quite easy to write tests for your Grails controllers and services. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Using frameworks like Grails tends to leave you with monolithic beasts over time. I've tended to favor toward an approach where the UI and server-side are divorced. For example, an architecture with a "REST"-ful back-end (almost no server-side rendering) along with single-page apps for the front-end. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Be careful of building large monolith. I personally would not use Grails view rendering (GSP) except for very basic things, because I prefer JS-based apps and a back-end design that does not assume anything about the front end. I.e., a service-oriented approach - endpoints that accept and return JSON, for example. Then I can write mobile apps, desktop web apps, etc.., that all talk to the same services. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** When I started using Grails, the speed with which you could build something was amazing, compared to other options available to me at the time (such as Oracle ADF, which just blows). That's very important. You want a developer to be able to get instant feedback on their work. To me, the development cycle was fantastic. It kept me in the zone. If, as developer, I'm forced to wait for my tools or wait for builds and such, I'm likely to get distracted and therefore be much less productive than I otherwise could be. ### 25. Simple and intuitive **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Clara Y. | Senior Frontend Developer, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Understandable and easy syntax. Easy way to import services. Easy way to handle lists/arrays. A lot of plugins are available and easy to use. You can see changes only refreshing the page, no need to recompile witch saves a lot of time. **What do you dislike about Grails?** The only downside I found is that it's hard to find an IDE that can read the syntax without buying intelliJ **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Make application run faster. Make changes easy and fast. ### 26. Best Java Framework for Prototyping a product **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** I like the easiness of the framework. One can really get a quick start on a project. Even if someone has started the development, he can also take advantage of it to create a prototype quickly. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Black Boxed plugins. This is really a big challenge for us right now. Grails user should not depends up on the community driven plugin to fulfill their needs. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** The team should be well versed in OOPs and knows insight of each and every line written on Grails, else you will screw up the things **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Can't tell you the business problems but dealing with micro services based architecture was really of great help ### 27. awesome **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rohit B. | Senior Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Convention over configuration, Less boilerplate code, Development is fun and very easy, I can focus more on business logic of the application rather then performing the framework ceremonies. **What do you dislike about Grails?** Debugging is hard sometimes, I hope it is improved in Grails3 **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are in a health care social integration business and always have very dynamic and custom requirements, Grails helps us to do the easily and very fast. ### 28. It was a great experience **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Electronics | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 24, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** It was my first professional job, it made it easier to start since it makes the stack simpler than using Java. **What do you dislike about Grails?** The community wasn't really big when I worked with Grails. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Grails was the right tool considering a JAVA expert team, it made it quicker to develop. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** New saas software for Google Adsense. Grails made it much faster do get an MVC done in comparison to JAVA. The development team didn't have much experience with saas development, grails reduced the stack complaxity. ### 29. Made my life a lot easier **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gerardo B. | Freelance - SEM Manager, Leisure, Travel & Tourism, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Grails is a great tool that made my life easier, really like Integrated ORM / NoSQL support. **What do you dislike about Grails?** I am a new user so im still learning about the tool. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy to use platform. ### 30. About one year of work experience with grails 2.5 and 3.0 **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sergey L. | Java Developer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** Super fast configuration for API, a lot of plugins **What do you dislike about Grails?** Grails community is too small, too little examples with a new technologies for the beginners **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Grails for development of backend. ### 31. Fullstack powerful framework **Rating:** 0.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** .................................................................................................................................................................... **What do you dislike about Grails?** Since it uses Java, the development requires so much hardware, or it may be tedious cause this is slow. Another point is that it changes so much, features appear and desappar from a version to other. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** .................................................................................................................................................................... **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** .................................................................................................................................................................... ### 32. Grails is Awesome! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gerardo Andres G. | Master Jedi Web Developer, Program Development, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** I like the ease, efficiency and speed that has Grails when building any application. **What do you dislike about Grails?** I do not really dislike anything about the Grails framework, it really is very very useful. **Recommendations to others considering Grails:** Use this framework is wonderful and impressive not believe the infinite possibilities of use. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** For confidentiality reasons I can not comment on this item, sorry. ### 33. A powerful framework to build Java web applications in a short time **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2016 **What do you like best about Grails?** scaffolding, spring/hibernate integrations, domain specific language for database queries **What do you dislike about Grails?** a lot of plugins that are not under active maintenance and obsolete. **What problems is Grails solving and how is that benefiting you?** My last use of grails was meant for evaluation. No practical application so far. ## Grails Discussions - [What is Grails used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-grails-used-for) - [View Grails pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/grails/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-25+00%3A16%3A40+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=1b2b18a9-dd04-4865-b110-4ea7d2459ca0&secure%5Btoken%5D=0f0850f9b124403043b57ece6393ddf96e2e031b10723f07095ea4ce5a88194e&format=llm_user) ## Top Grails Alternatives - [spring.io](https://www.g2.com/products/spring-io/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (290 reviews) - [Spark](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-spark/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (54 reviews) - [Vraptor](https://www.g2.com/products/vraptor/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (11 reviews)