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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Integration
  4. Continuous Integration
  5. Gradle vs Jenkins

Gradle vs Jenkins

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Jenkins
Jenkins
Stacks59.2K
Followers50.4K
Votes2.2K
GitHub Stars24.6K
Forks9.2K
Gradle
Gradle
Stacks24.3K
Followers9.8K
Votes254
GitHub Stars18.1K
Forks5.0K

Gradle vs Jenkins: What are the differences?

**Key differences between Gradle and Jenkins**
  1. Build Tool vs Continuous Integration Server: Gradle is a build automation tool that focuses on project automation and managing dependencies, while Jenkins is a continuous integration server that focuses on automating the building, testing, and deploying of software projects.
  2. Configuration Language: Gradle uses Groovy as its configuration language, allowing users to write build scripts with a higher level of flexibility and expressiveness. Jenkins, on the other hand, uses a declarative language for pipeline configuration, which provides a more structured and simplified approach.
  3. Scalability and Flexibility: Gradle is highly scalable and flexible, allowing users to build different types of projects and customize the build process according to specific needs. Jenkins, being a continuous integration server, is designed to handle distributed builds and offers a wide range of plugins for integrating with other tools and services.
  4. Community and Ecosystem: Gradle has a strong and active community with a vast ecosystem of plugins and extensions available, making it easier for users to find solutions and enhance their build processes. Jenkins also has a large community and plugin ecosystem, but its primary focus is on continuous integration and delivery.
  5. Out-of-the-box Features: Gradle provides a set of powerful features out-of-the-box, such as incremental builds, parallel execution, and task caching, which can significantly improve build performance. Jenkins offers various features for continuous integration, such as automated testing, deployment, and reporting, along with the ability to create complex pipeline workflows.
  6. Integration with IDEs: Gradle seamlessly integrates with popular IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse, providing a smooth development experience. Jenkins, on the other hand, can be integrated with IDEs using plugins, but its main focus is on providing a centralized platform for managing and executing build processes.

In Summary, Gradle is a versatile build automation tool that excels in project automation and dependency management, while Jenkins is a powerful continuous integration server specialized in automating the building, testing, and deployment processes.

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Advice on Jenkins, Gradle

Balaramesh
Balaramesh

Apr 20, 2020

Needs adviceonAzure PipelinesAzure Pipelines.NET.NETJenkinsJenkins

We are currently using Azure Pipelines for continous integration. Our applications are developed witn .NET framework. But when we look at the online Jenkins is the most widely used tool for continous integration. Can you please give me the advice which one is best to use for my case Azure pipeline or jenkins.

663k views663k
Comments
StackShare
StackShare

Apr 17, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: "Currently we use Travis CI and have optimized it as much as we can so our builds are fairly quick. Our boss is all about redundancy so we are looking for another solution to fall back on in case Travis goes down and/or jacks prices way up (they were recently acquired). Could someone recommend which CI we should go with and if they have time, an explanation of how they're different?"

529k views529k
Comments
Tatiana
Tatiana

Nov 16, 2019

Decided

Jenkins is a pretty flexible, complete tool. Especially I love the possibility to configure jobs as a code with Jenkins pipelines.

CircleCI is well suited for small projects where the main task is to run continuous integration as quickly as possible. Travis CI is recommended primarily for open-source projects that need to be tested in different environments.

And for something a bit larger I prefer to use Jenkins because it is possible to make serious system configuration thereby different plugins. In Jenkins, I can change almost anything. But if you want to start the CI chain as soon as possible, Jenkins may not be the right choice.

734k views734k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Jenkins
Jenkins
Gradle
Gradle

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

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.

Easy installation;Easy configuration;Change set support;Permanent links;RSS/E-mail/IM Integration;After-the-fact tagging;JUnit/TestNG test reporting;Distributed builds;File fingerprinting;Plugin Support
Declarative builds and build-by-convention;Language for dependency based programming;Structure your build;Deep API;Gradle scales;Multi-project builds;Many ways to manage your dependencies;Gradle is the first build integration tool
Statistics
GitHub Stars
24.6K
GitHub Stars
18.1K
GitHub Forks
9.2K
GitHub Forks
5.0K
Stacks
59.2K
Stacks
24.3K
Followers
50.4K
Followers
9.8K
Votes
2.2K
Votes
254
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 523
    Hosted internally
  • 469
    Free open source
  • 318
    Great to build, deploy or launch anything async
  • 243
    Tons of integrations
  • 211
    Rich set of plugins with good documentation
Cons
  • 13
    Workarounds needed for basic requirements
  • 10
    Groovy with cumbersome syntax
  • 8
    Plugins compatibility issues
  • 7
    Lack of support
  • 7
    Limited abilities with declarative pipelines
Pros
  • 110
    Flexibility
  • 51
    Easy to use
  • 47
    Groovy dsl
  • 22
    Slow build time
  • 10
    Crazy memory leaks
Cons
  • 8
    Inactionnable documentation
  • 6
    It is just the mess of Ant++
  • 4
    Hard to decide: ten or more ways to achieve one goal
  • 2
    Dependency on groovy
  • 2
    Bad Eclipse tooling

What are some alternatives to Jenkins, Gradle?

Travis CI

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

CircleCI

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

Apache Maven

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

TeamCity

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

wercker

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

GoCD

GoCD

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers business a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility.

Bazel

Bazel

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.

Shippable

Shippable

Shippable is a SaaS platform that lets you easily add Continuous Integration/Deployment to your Github and BitBucket repositories. It is lightweight, super simple to setup, and runs your builds and tests faster than any other service.

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