Unfortunately you can't just upgrade gradle alone, so you would have to upgrade the Grails version with it. Upgrading from 3 isn't that bad. I wouldn't bother doing incremental upgrades,but upgrading to the latest version of 5.x or 6.x, looking thought and making any changes detailed in the upgrade guides. The major difference between 5 and 6 are some depdency updates and the cli. If you choose 5 be ready to upgrade to 7 when it comes out. I don't know when 7 will come out, as that is in the hands of the community which is working on finalizing plans for what Grails 7 will be. Upgrade guides: https://grails.github.io/legacy-grails-doc/3.2.0/guide/upgrading.html https://grails.github.io/legacy-grails-doc/3.3.0/guide/upgrading.html https://docs.grails.org/latest/guide/upgrading.html