Best Salesforce DevOps Tools In 2023 (For Development, Testing, Deployment, And More)
Salesforce DevOps aims to streamline the development, testing, and deployment of Salesforce applications by automating the process and providing a consistent approach to software delivery.
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To achieve this goal, Salesforce offers a range of DevOps tools, enabling teams to collaborate more effectively and deliver software faster and reliably. These tools include:
- Version control systems
- Continuous integration and delivery pipelines
- Testing frameworks
- Deployment automation.
By using Salesforce DevOps tools, teams can reduce the risk of errors and downtime, increase the quality of their work, and deliver value to customers more rapidly.
Improved collaboration
DevOps tools help developers and other team members collaborate more effectively, enabling them to work together on the same codebase and track changes in real time.
Faster delivery
With DevOps tools, you can automate the deployment process, which helps speed up the time it takes to deliver new features and functionality to end users.
Better quality
DevOps tools help improve the quality of Salesforce applications by providing automated testing and continuous integration capabilities. This ensures that bugs are caught early in the development process, reducing the likelihood of issues being introduced into production.
Increased agility
With DevOps tools, teams can respond more quickly to changing business requirements and market conditions by delivering faster application changes and updates with less risk.
Reduced risk
DevOps tools help reduce the risk of application downtime and other issues by providing a more streamlined and automated deployment process. This ensures that changes are deployed correctly and consistently across different environments, reducing the risk of errors or conflicts.
With so many advantages of using these tools, this article will discuss some of the best Salesforce DevOps tools available today.
Hutte: best for source-driven development
Pricing: There is a free plan and paid-for plans that range from $25 and above.
Core features: Hutte allows teams to build and ship work on the Salesforce platform more efficiently. Teams don't need to learn to install and use command-line tooling and Git. Users can take a fully prepared development environment (scratch org) from the pool.
Hutte is a go-to software for companies that have embraced Git-based development and use second-generation packages (2GP).
Users can create and manage Salesforce scratch orgs and sandboxes through an intuitive and collaborative visual interface, without the need for code.
Hutte also integrates with all the popular version control providers, such as:
- GitHub
- Gitlab
- Azure
- Bitbucket.
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With Hutte, pushing Salesforce changes and creating pull requests are easy and seamless. Built by Salesforce professionals, Hutte is hand-crafted to design and develop metadata types, applications, and products for Salesforce professionals.
Suppose a team’s work includes extending and customizing Salesforce instances or building products as an independent software vendor (ISV). In that case, they need tools to organize and manage their development and releases. That’s why Hutte was created to be:
Lightweight
A tool that users can take on the go without taking up too much space.
Affordable
It is an all-encompassing platform that removes the need to invest heavily in DevOps.
Empowering
The tool allows product managers, admins, and consultants to contribute work without knowing the bells and whistles of Salesforce DX and Git.
Easy to use
Anyone involved in Salesforce can work quickly and productively.
Hutte is a UI when it comes to Salesforce DX. It offers everything a single developer can do on their local machine but in the cloud.
Check out the interactive online demo below:
Hutte is truly one of the best tools that we use. Product owners, Salesforce solution architects, business analysts — anyone on our team can easily and visually accomplish the tasks that would otherwise take a lot of clicks, time, and coding.
Copado: best for release management
Pricing: Plans that range from $2K and above.
Core features: Streamlined Salesforce development, continuous delivery for deployment processes, and built-in governance and compliance.
Copado is a cloud-based platform that provides DevOps and release management solutions for Salesforce applications.
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It offers a range of tools and features for managing the entire application development lifecycle, from planning and building to testing, deployment, and release.
The tool is a popular platform that offers many benefits for organizations looking to streamline their software development and deployment processes. Here are some of the key benefits of using Copado:
Agile development
Copado enables agile development by providing a platform that encourages collaboration among team members, automated testing, and continuous software delivery.
Scalability
The tool is designed to scale to the needs of any organization, whether it's a small business or a large enterprise. It can handle large volumes of data and support complex deployments.
Version control
With Copado, you can easily manage and track changes to your Salesforce code and configurations, ensuring that all changes are tracked and can be rolled back if necessary.
Automation
Copado's automation features help to streamline the software development process, making it faster and more efficient. This includes automated testing, deployment, and release management.
Security
It offers robust security features to protect your Salesforce data and configurations, ensuring they are only accessible to authorized team members.
From my experience, Copado is a solid deployment tool. We used the query option for most deployments which is very helpful when moving Salesforce CPQ Data.
Blue Canvas: best for auto source control
Pricing: Plans start from $150.
Core features: Blue Canvas provides a version control system for Salesforce developers to manage their metadata and code changes. The tool streamlines the release management process for Salesforce applications and enables collaboration between developers, admins, and business stakeholders.
Blue Canvas is a cloud-based platform for collaborative software application design and development. It is primarily used for version control, collaboration, and management of design artifacts, code, and other development assets.
It is focused on improving the collaboration and communication among the stakeholders of a software project, including developers, designers, product owners, and other team members.
Blue Canvas offers a variety of features that are designed to improve the software development process, including:
Version control
Blue Canvas provides a centralized repository for code and design artifacts, allowing teams to collaborate on software projects while keeping track of changes and versions.
Collaboration tools
The platform includes tools for real-time collaboration, such as chat, comments, and notifications, allowing team members to communicate and work together more efficiently.
Design and prototyping tools
Blue Canvas provides tools for designing and prototyping software applications, including drag-and-drop interfaces, templates, and libraries of design assets.
Integration with other tools
Blue Canvas can be integrated with other development tools like GitHub, Jira, and Slack to streamline the development process.
Analytics and reporting
Blue Canvas provides insights into the development process, such as usage data and performance metrics, which can be used to optimize the development process and improve team productivity.
We've been using Blue Canvas for deployments and also the CPQ app for the last 6 months. We're using it with Visual Code and Slack for communicating all the deployments, errors, etc., in an automated way. My experience couldn't be better (and I've used other release management apps before).
Amplify DX: best for deploying cloud-native applications
Pricing: Pricing tiers can be requested when starting a free trial.
Core features: Faster development, improved code quality, and an enhanced developer experience.
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Amplify DX is a software development tool and platform designed to help developers build and deploy cloud-native applications more efficiently. It is an open-source project and is part of the Amplify framework created by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The main goal of Amplify DX is to simplify the development process for cloud-native applications by providing tools and best practices.
Amplify DX focuses on streamlining the developer experience by providing features that reduce the complexity of building, testing, and deploying cloud-native applications.
Some of the critical features of Amplify DX include the following:
Development tools
Amplify DX provides development tools that help developers build cloud-native applications more efficiently. These tools include a command-line interface (CLI), a local development environment, and an integrated development environment (IDE) plugin.
Easy deployment
It integrates with AWS services, such as AWS AppSync and AWS Lambda, to facilitate application deployment to the cloud.
Best practices
Amplify DX incorporates best practices for cloud-native application development, including serverless architectures, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
Open source
The tool is an open-source project, meaning developers can contribute to the platform.
Amplify DX is a release management tool for Salesforce that works with any CI system.
Gearset: best for continuous delivery
Pricing: Prices start from $200 per seat per month.
Core features: Continuous integration to automatically build and test code, release pipelines and automation of changes deployed, sandboxing, and backup or restore capabilities.
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Gearset is a Salesforce DevOps and deployment tool designed to help developers and administrators streamline their development process and ensure the quality of their Salesforce code.
It provides a range of features that enable teams to automate their development workflow, including automated testing, continuous integration, and version control.
With Gearset, users can easily compare and deploy changes between Salesforce environments, from development to testing or production.
Gearset also includes various reporting and monitoring features to help teams track their progress and identify potential issues early in development.
Gearset is a powerful tool that can help Salesforce teams to improve their:
- Development processes
- Increase collaboration
- Accelerate the delivery of high-quality code.
Being able to easily connect your org in Gearset and then just click a couple of buttons to deploy the changes, I think that's what really stood out and that's where I see the immediate value for it.
Salto: Best For Exploring Metadata
Pricing: Pricing tiers can be requested when starting a free trial.
Core features: Salto provides a unified view of the configuration of Salesforce, it enables collaboration across teams, and it deploys changes quicker.
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Salto is an open-source software configuration management tool used to manage and automate the deployment of changes to complex software systems.
It is designed to work with cloud-based applications, particularly software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and NetSuite.
Salto uses declarative language to define the desired configuration of the software system, allowing developers and administrators to specify changes and their dependencies in a human-readable format.
The tool provides a unified view of the system's configuration, making it easier to identify and resolve conflicts between changes made by multiple developers.
Salto automates the deployment process, including validation, testing, and rollback capabilities, reducing the risk of errors and downtime caused by manual deployment processes.
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With Salto, developers can deploy changes to the system more quickly and with greater confidence, improving the overall efficiency of the development process.
I used Illuminated Cloud and Visual Studio Code for metadata search tasks before, which was a hassle if you were just looking for some hard-coded reference or such. Salto is so much more convenient.
OrgFlow: Best For Application Lifecycle Management
Pricing: Prices range from $495 and above.
Core features: Up-to-date codebases, prevention of code-clobbers, and Git repository syncs.
OrgFlow connects your Salesforce orgs to your preferred DevOps platform, enabling the implementation of Salesforce-friendly DevOps best practices.
With OrgFlow at its core, your Git repository perfectly syncs with your Salesforce orgs, whether changes are made by no-code users within your Salesforce org or by pro-code users directly in the Git repository.
Thanks to intelligent merging algorithms, OrgFlow prevents code-clobber, while metadata normalization significantly reduces noise in your Git repository, with nearly zero merge conflicts.
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Author attribution makes it easy to trace who made what change and when without requiring Salesforce users to have Git accounts.
Upstream and downstream merging of metadata changes keeps your admins and developers working confidently with the most up-to-date codebase, freeing you from the burden of maintaining stale sandboxes.
OrgFlow is compatible with popular cloud-based DevOps platforms such as:
- Azure
- DevOps
- GitHub Actions
- GitLab
- Jenkins
- Bitbucket
- TeamCity.
This allows you to harness the powerful DevOps features of each platform, including work item tracking, change approval (peer reviews), and automatic deployment triggers.
OrgFlow is a tool that opens the Salesforce platform up to modern software development, version control, deployment and automation techniques.
Opsera: best software for delivery processes
Pricing: Prices start from $125.
Core features: Opsera helps teams automate their entire software development lifecycle, assists cross-functional teams, and is a scalable platform that can handle large-scale software development projects.
Opsera is a cloud-native DevOps orchestration platform that enables organizations to automate their software development and delivery processes.
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It offers a unified platform that integrates with popular DevOps tools such as Jenkins, GitHub, Kubernetes, and AWS. It also provides a range of features, such as continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), automated testing, and infrastructure management.
The tool allows teams to collaborate more effectively and streamline their workflows by providing a single source of truth for all DevOps processes.
It offers a customizable dashboard that provides real-time insights into the performance of the software delivery pipeline, enabling teams to identify bottlenecks and optimize their workflows.
Opsera also offers a range of security features, such as role-based access control, compliance reporting, and automated security testing, ensuring the software delivery process is secure and compliant with industry standards and regulations.
At Opsera, our mission and goal is to bring order to the chaos. And the way we want to do this is by giving choice and flexibility to the users and provide no-code automation using a unified framework.
Clayton.io: Best For Code Analysis
Pricing: Prices start from $790.
Core features: Clayton.io analyzes code changes in real-time, automates the code review process, and the tool integrates with CI/CD pipelines.
Clayton.io is a code review platform that provides automated code analysis and review tools to help software development teams improve the quality of their code.
The platform offers a range of features, including code quality analysis, code duplication detection, security analysis, and more.
It integrates with popular version control systems, such as GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab, allowing developers to initiate code reviews and receive feedback on their code quickly.
The platform also provides real-time feedback and suggestions for improving code quality, enabling developers to improve efficiently.
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In addition to code review, Clayton.io offers a range of features to help teams manage their codebase and collaborate more effectively, including issue tracking, pull request management, and team analytics.
The platform is designed to be easy to use and customizable, allowing teams to tailor it to their needs and workflows.
On an average day, Clayton stops 1679 vulnerabilities before they cause damage.
Flosum: best for development workflows
Pricing: Pricing tiers can be requested when starting a free trial.
Core features: Flosum helps teams to develop, test, and deploy changes to Salesforce environments more quickly. It provides a centralized platform for managing the entire Salesforce development lifecycle. The tool enables collaboration between development teams.
Flosum is a cloud-based Salesforce DevOps and release management platform that helps Salesforce development teams to manage the end-to-end release process, including:
- Planning
- Building
- Testing
- Deploying
- Reporting.
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Flosum provides a range of features that enable teams to automate their development workflow, increase collaboration, and improve the quality and speed of their software releases.
Developers can manage their source code in a secure repository, collaborate on changes using branching and merging, and automate the testing and deployment of changes across Salesforce environments.
Flosum also provides governance, compliance, and reporting tools, allowing organizations to ensure that their development processes meet industry standards and regulatory business requirements.
It is a comprehensive DevOps and release management solution designed specifically for the Salesforce platform.
Flosum provides teams with the tools they need to improve their development processes, accelerate their release cycles, and deliver high-quality software more efficiently.
Flosum features are amazing! Since it's done IN Salesforce FOR Salesforce. It optimizes time and generates quality in the delivery of the entire team.
Prodly: best for migrating data
Pricing: Prices start from $150.
Core features: Prodly provides a powerful data replication feature that enables teams to move data from one Salesforce environment to another. It simplifies the data deployment process. The tool enables teams to compare data between different Salesforce environments.
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Prodly is a cloud-based data management solution for Salesforce that allows users to easily manage and migrate complex data structures between Salesforce orgs.
It offers tools for building, deploying, and managing Salesforce applications, including data models, business logic, and user interfaces.
The tool provides a user-friendly interface that allows users to create data models and migrate data between orgs with just a few clicks.
It also offers various features, such as data mapping, validation rules, and automated testing, to ensure data quality and accuracy during the migration process.
In addition, Prodly offers advanced security features, such as encryption and access controls, to ensure that data is kept secure during the migration process.
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Prodly also integrates with other Salesforce tools and platforms, such as Salesforce DX and Salesforce AppExchange, to make it easy for users to manage their entire Salesforce development lifecycle from a single platform.
Prodly is an incredible tool for moving data. We use it on a regular basis for our Products & Pricing migrations between our different environments, and it has been incredibly helpful and efficient.
Panaya: best for change management
Pricing: Prices start from $49.
Core features: Panaya provides a comprehensive test management solution. The tool simplifies the change management process. It enables teams to manage the entire enterprise resource planning release process.
Panaya is a cloud-based software testing and change management platform that provides end-to-end testing solutions for enterprise software applications.
It offers a suite of tools and services for managing testing processes and accelerating application delivery, focusing on reducing risks and improving the quality of software releases.
It has features like test management, test automation, and risk-based testing, which help users prioritize their testing efforts based on business impact and criticality.
Its test automation capabilities allow users to create and execute automated tests across various platforms and technologies, reducing the time and effort required for manual testing.
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Panaya provides advanced change management capabilities, including release management, impact analysis, and collaboration tools. It enables users to manage change requests, track changes, and ensure compliance with regulatory and industry standards.
The tool integrates with various enterprise software systems, including SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce, and offers pre-built test scripts and test cases for these systems.
This makes it easier for organizations to manage complex software environments and ensure their applications perform optimally.
Panaya ForeSight helped in reducing our manual effort in doing impact analysis and provides us more accurate details on where the impacts are coming from.
CumulusCI: best for highly customized DevOps workflows (for expert users)
Pricing: The tool is free.
Core features: CumulusCI provides a powerful task automation engine that enables teams to automate repetitive tasks and processes. It supports version control for Salesforce metadata and code. The tool provides a comprehensive build and release management solution for Salesforce applications.
CumulusCI (CCI) is an open-source toolset and framework for building and deploying Salesforce applications.
It is designed to help Salesforce developers and administrators automate the application development, testing, and deployment.
It provides a suite of command-line tools and a declarative YAML configuration language that allows users to automate complex development workflows.
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The tool supports various development methodologies, including Agile and Continuous Delivery, and integrates with popular version control systems like GitHub and GitLab.
The key features of CumulusCI include:
Automated testing
CCI provides a mechanical testing framework for Salesforce applications, including functional, unit, and integration testing support.
Source control integration
CCI integrates with popular source control systems such as GitHub and GitLab, allowing developers to easily manage their codebase and track changes.
Packaging and deployment
It provides tools for creating and managing Salesforce packages and automating deployment processes, reducing the risk of deployment errors.
Collaboration
CCI provides tools like code review and issue tracking.
CumulusCI is designed to be highly customizable and extensible, enabling users to tailor the toolset to their specific needs.
It is also supported by a vibrant community of contributors and users, who contribute to its ongoing development and provide support through forums and documentation.
CumulusCI is an orchestration layer. It helps you run reproducible builds and create new environments of many different kinds that are fully configured and ready to do work in.
Equip yourself with the right tool
These Salesforce DevOps tools can help you improve your development processes, streamline your workflows, and deliver high-quality software faster and with fewer errors.
Choose the tool that best suits your team's needs and requirements for efficient Salesforce development.
This list doesn’t contain every DevOps tool on the market, but it is an excellent place to start.
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As the saying goes by Wallace Wattles: “It is essential to have good tools, but it is also essential that the tools should be used in the right way.”
So, as long as you select and tailor a tool to your preferences, you are on the right track.
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