When comparing Gradle vs Gulp, the Slant community recommends Gradle for most people. In the question“What are the best general purpose build systems?” Gradle is ranked 2nd while Gulp is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Gradle is:
Android Studio's build system is an Android plugin for Gradle. What's more is that the Android Gradle plugin can be installed and run even on machines that don't have Android Studio, which enables you to build Android apps everywhere (for example continuous integration servers).
Specs
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Pros
Pro Official Android Studio build tool
Android Studio's build system is an Android plugin for Gradle. What's more is that the Android Gradle plugin can be installed and run even on machines that don't have Android Studio, which enables you to build Android apps everywhere (for example continuous integration servers).
Pro Lots of plugins available
Gradle has hundreds of open source plugins available. This is extremely helpful for users who want to speed up their development.
Pro Dependency programming tool
Gradle is a dependency programming tool first and foremost. Gradle will make sure that all declared dependencies are properly executed for every random task that you execute in your setup. The code can be spread across many directories in any kind of file layout.
Pro Short scripts
Since Gradle does not use XML but it uses it's own DSL based on Groovy, Gradle scripts tend to be shorter than other build tools that use XML. Boilerplate code is also considerably small because it's DSL is designed to solve a specific problem: moving the software through its lifecycle starting from compilation into static analysis and testing, packaging and finally deployment.
Pro Integrates with Maven
Gradle can deploy to remote Maven repositories or even install to your local Maven repo.
Pro Built for continuous delivery
Gradle can be easily integrated with Jenkins to create a continuous delivery pipeline for any Java application.
Pro IDEA integration
Gradle has full integration with Jetbrains IDEA.
IDEA understands multi-module Gradle builds and automatically maintains the IDEA modules within the project.
You also have the option to run unit tests with either the built-in JUnit/TestNG test runner, or delegate running the test to Gradle using the same visualization as the built-in runner.
Pro Integration with Ant
Gradle integrates perfectly with Ant. Giving developers a lot of Ant's flexibility. You can run individual Ant tasks on Gradle or even entire Ant builds.
Pro Convention over configuration
Gradle follows the convention over configuration paradigm in order to make it easier for developers by having already made a number of decisions out of the box.
Pro Eclipse integration
Gradle has full integration with Eclipse through developer tools and plugins.
Pro Large plugin ecosystem
Currently gulp offers a selection of 1000+ plugins and it is growing rapidly.
Pro Focuses on code instead of configuration
This depends on your style, but gulp is closer to the code, the actual execution isn't hidden by multiple layers and it's much easier to customize the build system without writing bloated modules. This also brings rather small configuration files.
Pro Allows creating task dependencies
Any task can be set to have other tasks as dependencies. The dependencies are specified through piping streams, and tasks run concurrently if they do not block in dependencies.
Pro It is possible to use projects that use streams without plugins
Since Gulp just uses streams at its core, you don't actually need a plugin wrapper to use a project that uses streams. If you use this approach, the you don't even have to worry about plugin maintenance at all, and get the bleeding edge updates as soon as they come out even if the plugin hasn't been updated. It also means if a project happens to not have a plugin, you don't need to write a new one, you can just use it as is.
Pro Streaming build system makes it easier to apply code transformations
In gulp, it's easy to pipe multiple steps together which you commonly need with build systems. For example, you may need to compile the javascript source files, then package them together, and then minify it. The streaming system makes this much easier.
Additionally, it improves performance since all operations are done in memory (compared to I/O operations) and avoids the need of unnecessarily compiling files (compared to Grunt that has to compile all files even if just one has changed).
Pro Chaining API that's simple and elegant
In Gulp, the transforms are performed through chains which makes it easier to understand the order of operations, and easier to modify it.
Pro Concurrency allows for high-speed perfomance
Because streams in Gulp use pipes to establish dependency order, they are parallel by default without having to rely on plugins or hacks.
Pro Minimizes disk operations for improved performance
Because Gulp is built using streams, it can store intermediate transformations in memory and defer writing to disk until the very end. This improves performance by not requiring expensive blocking disk operations for task dependencies.
Pro The configuration file is easily readable
Gulp's configuration file is actually very readable because it's actual JavaScript instead of a large file of JSON objects. The entry barrier is very low for developers who have never used a task runner before and it's API is very simple, with only 4 methods.
Pro Gulp modules are usable without Gulp
Because Gulp is built on top of the streaming API, you don't actually need gulp to use them. This could be helpful if you want to re-use those modules outside of gulp, possibly for testing, and using the same modules would be more consistent.
Pro Gulp tasks run from terminal
Cons
Con Can get slow for large builds
Since Gradle uses Groovy instead of XML for it's configuration scripts, it achieves a great deal of flexibility but unfortunately that comes with slower builds when the project gets large enough. This is because the entire Groovy script has to be recompiled for every build instead of simply being parsed.
Con Dead
Gulp is dead, hasn't been updated in 4 years.
Con Rapidly changing API
While it's good that the gulp maintainers want the api to be as good as possible, it comes at the expense of stability. The upcoming gulp 4.0 release has another update to the way dependency management works which will require everyone to update their build scripts.
It also makes it hard to look up information on best practices as the best practices keep changing, making a lot of the blog posts and questions about gulp out of date.
Con You need to know some limitations that are not very intuitive
There are some features in Gulp which may not be very intuitive, or that otherwise should have been the default features instead of having to implement them through arguments. For example, to keep the correct folder structure when you are copying a file, you have to add {base: "lib/"}
as an argument.
Con No incremental building
Con Not suited for big and complex apps
Writing gulpfile for complex app which consists of many source types is very cumbersome and flawy process. You'll know when you want to move to webpack.