Bazel vs Gradle vs Pants

Overview

Gradle

Stacks24.3K

Followers9.8K

Votes254

GitHub Stars18.1K

Forks5.0K

Pants

Stacks23

Followers86

Votes30

GitHub Stars3.7K

Forks674

Bazel

Stacks314

Followers579

Votes133

Bazel vs Gradle vs Pants: What are the differences?

Build Tool Purpose: Bazel is designed for large, complex projects with a focus on performance and reproducibility, while Gradle is more popular for its flexibility and ease of use in smaller projects. Pants, on the other hand, focuses on build automation and dependency management for diverse software projects.
Language Support: Bazel primarily supports Java, C++, and Python languages with limited support for others, whereas Gradle has a wide range of language compatibility, including Java, C++, Groovy, and more. Pants offers support for several languages such as Java, Python, Scala, and more, making it versatile in language support.
Build Caching: Bazel emphasizes build caching to improve build times and reduce redundant work, ensuring faster and more efficient builds. Gradle also offers build caching capabilities, but it may not be as fine-tuned and optimized as Bazel. Pants, on the other hand, focuses on task isolation and smart caching strategies to enhance build performance.
Community and Ecosystem: Gradle has a vast community and ecosystem with extensive plugin support and documentation, making it easier for developers to find solutions and resources. Bazel also has a supportive community but may not have as large of an ecosystem as Gradle. Pants is gaining traction in the build tool space but may have a smaller community and fewer available plugins compared to Gradle and Bazel.
Configuration and Extensibility: Bazel uses a declarative configuration language, BUILD files, which can be restrictive but offer strict dependency management. Gradle provides a more flexible and customizable configuration using Groovy or Kotlin scripts, allowing for easier extensibility. Pants uses a combination of Python-based configuration and BUILD files, offering a balance between flexibility and manageability in build configurations.
Corporate Backing: Bazel is developed and maintained by Google, emphasizing its focus on scalability, performance, and reproducibility for massive projects. Gradle is supported by Gradle Inc, providing commercial services and enterprise support, ensuring stability and reliability for businesses. Pants, originally developed by Twitter, has gained support from other companies like Foursquare and Square, offering a collaborative approach to build automation and innovation.

In Summary, the key differences between Bazel, Gradle, and Pants lie in their build tool purposes, language support, build caching strategies, community ecosystems, configuration styles, and corporate backing.

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Detailed Comparison

Gradle	Pants	Bazel
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.	Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.	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.
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	Builds Java, Scala, and Python.;Adding support for new languages is straightforward.;Supports code generation: thrift, protocol buffers, custom code generators.;Resolves external JVM and Python dependencies.;Runs tests.;Spawns Python and Scala REPLs with appropriate load paths.;Creates deployable packages.;Scales to large repos with many interdependent modules.;Designed for incremental builds.;Support for local and distributed caching.;Especially fast for Scala builds, compared to alternatives.;Builds standalone python executables (PEX files);Has a plugin system to add custom features and override stock behavior.;Runs on Linux and Mac OS X.	Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages;High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations;Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones;Reproducibility: In BUILD files, each library, test, and binary must specify its direct dependencies completely. Bazel uses this dependency information to know what must be rebuilt when you make changes to a source file, and which tasks can run in parallel. This means that all builds are incremental and will always produce the same result;Scalable: Bazel can handle large builds
Statistics
GitHub Stars 18.1K	GitHub Stars 3.7K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 5.0K	GitHub Forks 674	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 24.3K	Stacks 23	Stacks 314
Followers 9.8K	Followers 86	Followers 579
Votes 254	Votes 30	Votes 133
Pros & Cons
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	Pros 6 Creates deployable packages 4 Runs on Linux 4 Runs on OS X 4 BUILD files 4 Runs tests	Pros 28 Fast 20 Deterministic incremental builds 17 Correct 16 Multi-language 14 Enforces declared inputs/outputs Cons 3 No Windows Support 2 Bad IntelliJ support 1 Lack of Documentation 1 Constant breaking changes 1 Poor windows support for some languages
Integrations
No integrations available	No integrations available	Java Objective-C C++

What are some alternatives to Gradle, Pants, Bazel?

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.

JitPack

JitPack is an easy to use package repository for Gradle/Sbt and Maven projects. We build GitHub projects on demand and provides ready-to-use packages.

SBT

It is similar to Java's Maven and Ant. Its main features are: Native support for compiling Scala code and integrating with many Scala test frameworks.

Buck

Buck encourages the creation of small, reusable modules consisting of code and resources, and supports a variety of languages on many platforms.

Apache Ant

Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make's wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code.

Please

Please is a cross-language build system with an emphasis on high performance, extensibility and reproduceability. It supports a number of popular languages and can automate nearly any aspect of your build process.

CMake

It is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler independent configuration files, and generate native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of the user's choice.

Sonatype Nexus

It is an open source repository that supports many artifact formats, including Docker, Java™ and npm. With the Nexus tool integration, pipelines in your toolchain can publish and retrieve versioned apps and their dependencies

JFrog Artifactory

It integrates with your existing ecosystem supporting end-to-end binary management that overcomes the complexity of working with different software package management systems, and provides consistency to your CI/CD workflow.

EventBus

It enables central communication to decoupled classes with just a few lines of code – simplifying the code, removing dependencies, and speeding up app development.

Related Comparisons

Bazel vs Gradle vs Pants: What are the differences?

Build Tool Purpose: Bazel is designed for large, complex projects with a focus on performance and reproducibility, while Gradle is more popular for its flexibility and ease of use in smaller projects. Pants, on the other hand, focuses on build automation and dependency management for diverse software projects.
Language Support: Bazel primarily supports Java, C++, and Python languages with limited support for others, whereas Gradle has a wide range of language compatibility, including Java, C++, Groovy, and more. Pants offers support for several languages such as Java, Python, Scala, and more, making it versatile in language support.
Build Caching: Bazel emphasizes build caching to improve build times and reduce redundant work, ensuring faster and more efficient builds. Gradle also offers build caching capabilities, but it may not be as fine-tuned and optimized as Bazel. Pants, on the other hand, focuses on task isolation and smart caching strategies to enhance build performance.
Community and Ecosystem: Gradle has a vast community and ecosystem with extensive plugin support and documentation, making it easier for developers to find solutions and resources. Bazel also has a supportive community but may not have as large of an ecosystem as Gradle. Pants is gaining traction in the build tool space but may have a smaller community and fewer available plugins compared to Gradle and Bazel.
Configuration and Extensibility: Bazel uses a declarative configuration language, BUILD files, which can be restrictive but offer strict dependency management. Gradle provides a more flexible and customizable configuration using Groovy or Kotlin scripts, allowing for easier extensibility. Pants uses a combination of Python-based configuration and BUILD files, offering a balance between flexibility and manageability in build configurations.
Corporate Backing: Bazel is developed and maintained by Google, emphasizing its focus on scalability, performance, and reproducibility for massive projects. Gradle is supported by Gradle Inc, providing commercial services and enterprise support, ensuring stability and reliability for businesses. Pants, originally developed by Twitter, has gained support from other companies like Foursquare and Square, offering a collaborative approach to build automation and innovation.

Bazel vs Gradle vs Pants

Overview