Why is Gradle generally faster than Maven for incremental builds?

The speed difference mostly comes down to how each tool decides what actually needs to run. Maven's lifecycle-bound execution model runs every bound goal for a phase on every invocation by default, with much less built-in tracking of whether a given step's inputs actually changed. Gradle, by contrast, treats every task's inputs and outputs as explicitly tracked state, and skips a task entirely if nothing relevant to it has changed since the last successful run.

Three mechanisms compound this advantage:

1. Up-to-date checks — a task with unchanged inputs/outputs is skipped, not just re-run quickly.
2. Build cache — even a change on one machine can be skipped elsewhere if the exact same inputs already produced a cached output.
3. Configuration cache — skips re-evaluating build scripts altogether when the build structure itself hasn't changed.

For a full, from-scratch build with nothing cached, the difference is much smaller since both tools have to do the same fundamental compile/test/package work — Gradle's real advantage shows up specifically on repeated, incremental builds.