My knee jerk reaction (having not used SBT or Gradle in an real way) is that if you are building Scala apps go with the Scala based tool. That said, some Scala developers favor Gradle as their build tool. Which begs the question: then why not use Groovy instead of Scala? Sorry: not much of an answer :(

I haven't used either in depth. If you can keep your build simple then it probably doesn't matter. Go with gradle though, it's probably more generalised.

Lean towards Gradle over SBT due to the maturity of Gradle, and performance is better. Heard a few colleagues whinged about very slow of SBT.

To Marty's concern, I can only say build tool is in its own domain. Build tool doesn't need to run in the SAME JVM, at SAME time as app. App shouldn't care what verhicle drives it into the JVM.

Thanks for your responses.

My shout out to SBT was simply because it kept you in the world of Scala ;)

People complain about SBT because of the slow Scala compiler, so I don't think gradle will be any better on that front.