Why Spring Boot Switched from Maven to Gradle—and How It Boosts Build Speed

On a foreign social networking site, a post discussed migrating Spring Boot builds from Maven to Gradle. Many questioned why switch from a well‑working Maven setup. Spring Boot’s official blog explained the reasons.

Why migrate?

Spring Boot team says moving to Gradle reduces build time.

Maven builds cause long regression test times, slowing bug fixes and feature development.

Gradle aims to reduce work by building only changed parts and supporting parallel execution.

Attempts to achieve parallel builds with Maven failed due to project complexity.

Gradle’s cache and success in other Spring projects also motivated the change.

What are the benefits?

With Maven, even a small code change triggers a full rebuild, taking over an hour.

Spring Boot data shows Gradle builds average 9 minutes 22 seconds for the same project.

This represents a multi‑fold efficiency gain.

Impact on existing projects

Projects can continue using Maven for dependency management; Spring Boot artifacts remain in Maven Central.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot</artifactId>
    <version>2.3.1.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

However, building Spring Boot source code locally or learning the latest version requires Gradle.

Gradle is likely the future trend, but migration is optional based on project needs; both Maven and Gradle remain mainstream.