GNU Make vs Gradle

Make takes advantage of the powerful UNIX shell, using it at it's full potential. STDIN and STDOUT are especially useful because of their versatility.

Other build tools need wrapper modules to do certain tasks. The biggest disadvantage of these wrapper modules is that they bind you to a version of that tool. With Make you don't have that problem, there's no need for wrappers and no tools to bind you to a version, you can use any version of Make that you want.

Since it's written in C and can be found in all UNIX-based systems it can be used on platforms other than node.js.

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).

Gradle has hundreds of open source plugins available. This is extremely helpful for users who want to speed up their development.

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.

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.

Gradle can deploy to remote Maven repositories or even install to your local Maven repo.

Gradle can be easily integrated with Jenkins to create a continuous delivery pipeline for any Java application.

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.

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.

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.

Gradle has full integration with Eclipse through developer tools and plugins.