CircleCI vs. Gradle Build Tool (Open Source)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
CircleCI
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
CircleCI is a software delivery engine from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that helps teams ship software faster, offering their platform for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Ultimately, the solution helps to map every source of change for software teams, so they can accelerate innovation and growth.
$0
per month
Gradle Build Tool (Open Source)
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Gradle is an open source build system. Gradle boasts a rich API and mature ecosystem of plugins and integrations to support automation. Users can model, integrate and systematize the delivery of software from end to end.
$0
per month
Pricing
CircleCIGradle Build Tool (Open Source)
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
per month
Performance
$30
per month
Server
$35
per month
Scale
Custom Pricing
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CircleCIGradle Build Tool (Open Source)
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CircleCIGradle Build Tool (Open Source)
Top Pros

No answers on this topic

Top Cons

No answers on this topic

Best Alternatives
CircleCIGradle Build Tool (Open Source)
Small Businesses
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CircleCIGradle Build Tool (Open Source)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(26 ratings)
9.0
(12 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
7.8
(3 ratings)
3.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
6.9
(6 ratings)
9.0
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
CircleCIGradle Build Tool (Open Source)
Likelihood to Recommend
CircleCI
CircleCI is perfect for a CI/CD pipeline for an app using a standard build process. It'll take more work for a complex build process, but should still be up to the task unless you need a lot of integrations with other tools. If you have a big team and can spare someone to focus full time on just the CI/CD tools, maybe something like Jenkins is better, but if you're just looking to get your app built, tested, and delivered without a huge amount of effort, CircleCI is probably your preferred tool.
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Open Source
Gradle Build Tool is more suitable with the Java projects. It has helped us to automate the build part of the devops cycle. Its configuration and Groovy script is really easy to understand and can be implemented with ease. It can be used both for automation and manual buids of the projects. Gradle Build Tool is easy to use and easy to integrate.
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Pros
CircleCI
  • Multiple builds can be run at the same time in parallel.
  • The CircleCI web interface (UI/UX) is very easy to understand and use.
  • Easy Configuration to learn and use. Just a single configuration YAML file.
  • Many integrations. We use the GItHub, Slack, and DataDog integrations.
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Open Source
  • Gradle's methods to manipulate files is very flexible. It minimizes the amount of code one has to write to copy, move, or expand zip or tar files.
  • Gradle uses Groovy, which is a Java like language. This allows for most computer engineers to come up to speed fairly quickly, for writing or maintaining gradle code.
  • Gradle also supports DSL (Domain Specific Language), which is based on Groovy. The DSL language allows engineers to automate build jobs that otherwise could be very cumbersome to maintain or modify.
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Cons
CircleCI
  • The "phases" their config file uses to separate out options seem very arbitrary and are not very helpful for organizing your config file
  • No way that I know of to configure which version of MongoDB you use. You have to write your own shell script to download and start MongoDB if you want a specific version.
  • Hard to access build artifacts in the UI
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Open Source
  • I'd like to see a way to specify how to run only certain tests in parallel, I tried this feature and for tests that involve interaction with SQL Databases sometimes I can't because of deadlocks.
  • Not sure if there is something else, gradle has been working really good for us and they are adding improvements all the time which is awesome. I used to think the performance is a deal but the latest versions are addressing this issue very well
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Usability
CircleCI
CircleCI interface is awesome in that it is relatively modern and makes it clear exactly which parts of the engineering lifecycle you are in
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Open Source
Gradle's language construct is good
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Performance
CircleCI
It's pretty snappy, even with using workflows with multiple steps and different docker images. I've seen builds take a long time if it's really involved, but from what I can tell, it's still at least on par if not faster than other build tools.
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Open Source
I have tried to use Gradle for projects several times in the past, but there is just so much work in maintaining the build file that it quickly becomes untenable. I have been using Maven for many years, and even though the build file can be complex, it works without maintenance between releases.
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Support Rating
CircleCI
Unless you have a reasonably large account, you're going to be mainly stuck reading their documentation. Which has improved somewhat over the years but is still extremely limited compared to a platform like Digital Ocean who invested in the documentation and a community to ensure it's kept up to date. If you can't find your answer there, you can be stuck.
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Open Source
Gradle has been an excellent tool for Android development. It has helped us create multiple versions of the app for different environments. It also takes care of all the packaging needs in the background without having to write all the code related to that. It is a no brainer to use Gradle with Android applications.
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Alternatives Considered
CircleCI
Circle was the first CI with simple setup, great documentation, and tight integration with GitHub. Using Jenkins was too much maintenance and overhead, TeamCity was limited in how we could customize it and run concurrent builds, TravisCI was not available for private repos when we switched.
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Open Source
[Gradle is] a more modern version of open source build tools like Ant and Maven.
Whereas the build config was XML files which were tedious and error
prone, the modern DSL usage of Groovy to write these build files is a
great advancement. Also these config files can be inherited from top
level to each associated project.
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Return on Investment
CircleCI
  • It has eased the burden of standardizing our testing and deployment, making onboarding new developers much faster, and having to fix deployment mistakes much less often.
  • It allows us to focus our process around the GitHub workflow, ignoring the details of whatever environment the thing we're working on is actually hosted in. This saves us time.
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Open Source
  • In a distributed development environment, once we established a strong CI/CD model, Gradle proved to be a great choice to automate the various processes. Gradle also provides much flexibility, which is essential in today's development environment. The important benefit is that the CI/CD engineers can support development's needs quickly and reliably. This in turn supports faster testing and deployment, which generates higher ROI.
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