I'm kind of surprised you found Gradle slow. I did a fair amount of testing when we evaluated Maven vs Gradle for redoing our build, and I found Gradle to be significantly faster, even when running without the Daemon. Maven did not seem to have true parallelism at the time, I wonder if that has changed? Gradles task graph, though more complex, seemed far faster due to its ability to run non-inter-dependent tasks concurrently.