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.
To achieve this goal, Salesforce offers a range of DevOps tools that enable teams to collaborate more effectively and deliver software more quickly and reliably. These tools include:
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.
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.
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.
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.
With DevOps tools, teams can respond more quickly to changing business requirements and market conditions by delivering changes and updates to applications faster and with less 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.
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 how 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. This means that there is no need for code.
Hutte also integrates with all the popular version control providers, such as:
Suppose a team’s work contains extension and customization of 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:
A tool that users can take on the go without taking up too much space.
It is an all-encompassing platform that removes the need to invest heavily in DevOps.
The tool allows product managers, admins, and consultants to contribute work without knowing the bells and whistles of Salesforce DX and Git.
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.
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.
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:
Copado enables agile development by providing a platform that encourages collaboration among team members, automated testing, and continuous delivery of software.
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.
With Copado, you can easily manage and track changes to your Salesforce code and configurations, ensuring that all changes are tracked and can be easily rolled back if necessary.
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.
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.
Pricing: Plans start from $150.
Core features: Blue Canvas provides a version control system that allows Salesforce developers to manage their metadata and code changes. The tool streamlines the release management process for Salesforce applications. It enables collaboration between developers, admins, and business stakeholders.
Blue Canvas is a cloud-based platform for the collaborative design and development of software applications. 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:
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.
The platform includes tools for real-time collaboration, such as chat, comments, and notifications, allowing team members to communicate and work together more efficiently.
Blue Canvas provides tools for designing and prototyping software applications, including drag-and-drop interfaces, templates, and libraries of design assets.
Blue Canvas can be integrated with other development tools, such as GitHub, Jira, and Slack, to streamline the development process.
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).
Pricing: Pricing tiers can be requested when starting a free trial.
Core features: Faster development, improved code quality, and an enhanced developer experience.
The main goal of Amplify DX is to simplify the development process for cloud-native applications by providing a set of 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:
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.
It integrates with AWS services, such as AWS AppSync and AWS Lambda, to make deploying applications to the cloud easier.
Amplify DX incorporates best practices for cloud-native application development, including serverless architectures, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
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.
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, and sandboxing and backup or restore capabilities.
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 from testing to production.
Gearset also includes a range of 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Pricing: Prices start from $125.
Core features: Opsera helps teams automate their entire software development lifecycle, it assists cross-functional teams, and it’s 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.
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.
Pricing: Prices start from $790.
Core features: Clayton.io analyzes code changes in real-time, it 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 make improvements efficiently.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 a variety of 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.
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.
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 such as 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.
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.
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 development, testing, and deployment of Salesforce applications.
It provides a suite of command-line tools and a declarative YAML configuration language that allows users to automate complex development workflows.
The key features of CumulusCI include:
CCI provides a mechanical testing framework for Salesforce applications, including support for functional testing, unit testing, and integration testing.
CCI integrates with popular source control systems such as GitHub and GitLab, allowing developers to manage their codebase and track changes easily.
It provides tools for creating and managing Salesforce packages and automating deployment processes, reducing the risk of deployment errors.
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.
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.
So, as long as you select and tailor a tool to your preferences, you are heading in the right direction.
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