Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Bazel

Stacks284

Followers556

+ 1

Votes133

Gradle

Stacks15.4K

Followers9.1K

+ 1

Votes254

Add tool

Bazel vs Gradle: What are the differences?

Bazel: Correct, reproducible, fast builds for everyone. Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment; Gradle: A powerful build system for the JVM. Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

Bazel and Gradle can be primarily classified as "Java Build" tools.

Some of the features offered by Bazel are:

Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages.
High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations.
Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones.

On the other hand, Gradle provides the following key features:

Declarative builds and build-by-convention
Language for dependency based programming
Structure your build

"Fast" is the top reason why over 18 developers like Bazel, while over 106 developers mention "Flexibility" as the leading cause for choosing Gradle.

Bazel and Gradle are both open source tools. Bazel with 12.2K GitHub stars and 2K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Gradle with 9.16K GitHub stars and 2.67K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Gradle has a broader approval, being mentioned in 456 company stacks & 351 developers stacks; compared to Bazel, which is listed in 11 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.

Learn More

Pros of Bazel

Pros of Gradle

28
Fast
20
Deterministic incremental builds
17
Correct
16
Multi-language
14
Enforces declared inputs/outputs
10
High-level build language
9
Scalable
5
Multi-platform support
5
Sandboxing
4
Dependency management
2
Windows Support
2
Flexible
1
Android Studio integration

110
Flexibility
51
Easy to use
47
Groovy dsl
22
Slow build time
10
Crazy memory leaks
8
Fast incremental builds
5
Kotlin DSL
1
Windows Support

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Bazel

Cons of Gradle

3
No Windows Support
2
Bad IntelliJ support
1
Poor windows support for some languages
1
Constant breaking changes
1
Learning Curve
1
Lack of Documentation

8
Inactionnable documentation
6
It is just the mess of Ant++
4
Hard to decide: ten or more ways to achieve one goal
2
Bad Eclipse tooling
2
Dependency on groovy

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

What companies use Bazel?

What companies use Gradle?

See which teams inside your own company are using Bazel or Gradle.

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Bazel?

What tools integrate with Gradle?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

What are some alternatives to Bazel and Gradle?

Pants

Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

Webpack

A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.

Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Buck

Buck encourages the creation of small, reusable modules consisting of code and resources, and supports a variety of languages on many platforms.

CMake

It is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler independent configuration files, and generate native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of the user's choice.

See all alternatives

Bazel vs Gradle