--- title: Gradle Build Tool Reviews meta_title: 'Gradle Build Tool Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 39 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Gradle Build Tool works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 39 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-14' parent_category: name: CI/CD Tools url: https://www.g2.com/categories/ci-cd-tools --- # 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:** 39 ## 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. Powerful Open-Source Build Automation with Multi-Language Support **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 13, 2026 **What do you like best about Gradle Build Tool?** The best about Gradle build is it is an open-source build automation tool used to compile, test, package, and deploy applications. **What do you dislike about Gradle Build Tool?** Initial build of Gradle is very huge because we need to build complex scripts initially. **What problems is Gradle Build Tool solving and how is that benefiting you?** The problem that Gradle solving for me is execution of my application such as compiling code, execution of it and creation of artifacts out of that ### 2. 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 ### 3. 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 ### 4. 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. ### 5. 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. ### 6. 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! ### 7. 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. ### 8. 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! ### 9. 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! ### 10. 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! :) ## 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/gradle-build-tool-review-77978?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-20+17%3A19%3A26+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=3bea26d7-0f82-4473-8c33-cf4e7fcf4c9f&secure%5Btoken%5D=8aabd1987103f0d3a722e144d52589a42c4de67117ef2f9c1c03c276f49bf04f&format=llm_user) ## Top Gradle Build Tool Alternatives - [Jenkins](https://www.g2.com/products/jenkins/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (557 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)