Gradle Build Tool (Open Source) vs. TeamCity

Gradle is an ideal tool to build an application that is complex and/or distributed. It is well suited for builds that use a CI engine such as Jenkins or Bamboo, and a repository such as Artifactory.

TeamCity is well suited for an organization using continuous integration, meaning you release code to production often, and an agile project management system. There are free versions available for small teams and enterprise versions available for large teams with many different builds. TeamCity is probably overkill for basic e-commerce or blog website builds that do not require much development after the initial launch

• Build Cache - Enables quick build on dev machines
• Supports multi project builds - enabling modular architecture
• Customizable build tasks
• Support for multiple JVM languages

• Fully customizable build process. Each step of the build process can be parameterized and customized to address specific needs of particular applications. This allowed us to easily convert from a custom VM-based environment to our current Docker-based environment.
• Manages large numbers of build agents seamlessly. This allows us to run multiple builds on many different applications in a most efficient manner.
• Build steps can be managed in an arbitrary manner, allowing some parts of the process to proceed in parallel while restricting others to depend on completion of all relevant steps.

• Still under development, not as mature as Maven
• Build files aren't as easy to follow because they are so loose
• The community isn't as large as Maven

• It is not plug and play thing
• Need more specific configurations for smaller projects as well
• Online help is less available
• Basic implementation is easy but I think feature add on can be complex as it involve some language knowledge as well.

Gradle's language construct is good

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.

TeamCity runs really well, even when sharing a small instance with other applications. The user interface adequately conveys important information without being overly bloated, and it is snappy. There isn't any significant overhead to build agents or unit test runners that we have measured.

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.

SBT works fine for Scala but when I tried to use it with Java it was hard to configure and I gave up. Maven is awesome but the pom.xml file tends to be really big which makes it hard to read. Grunt is suitable only for js projects.

TeamCity is a great on-premise Continuous Integration tool. Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is a hosted SAAS application in Microsoft's Cloud. VSTS is a Source Code Repository, Build and Release System, and Agile Project Management Platform - whereas TeamCity is a Build and Release System only. TeamCity's interface is easier to use than VSTS, and neither have a great deployment pipeline solution. But VSTS's natural integration with Microsoft products, Microsoft's Cloud, Integration with Azure Active Directory, and free, private, Source Code repository - offer additional features and capabilities not available with Team City alone.

• 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.

• TeamCity has greatly improved team efficiency by streamlining our production and pre-production pipelines. We moved to TeamCity after seeing other teams have more success with it than we had with other tools.
• TeamCity has helped the reliability of our product by easily allowing us to integrate unit testing, as well as full integration testing. This was not possible with other tools given our corporate firewall.
• TeamCity's ability to include Docker containers in the pipeline steps has been crucial in improving our efficiency and reliability.