Third-party applications empower organizations to go beyond the inefficiency of change sets and custom scripting based solutions. As a result, they can help to solve some of the more complex DevOps scenarios such as easily comparing orgs, conducting an impact analysis, and creating automation regression tests.
The InVisory team strives to provide “Gartner Style” advisory for the AppExchange. Using their proprietary methodology, InVisory determines a vendor shortlist which is further supplemented with commentary from experts in their respective fields.
All insight is summarized in a “Tower” report, which positions each of the shortlisted vendors as “Front Runners”, “Contenders”, or “Innovators”.
- Front Runners: The most broadly applicable vendors. These vendors can cater to a range of use cases and can easily be scaled according to Salesforce requirements.
- Contenders: Deliver powerful features while maintaining an intuitive admin experience (fast configuration time), leading to a quicker time-to-value.
- Innovators: Up-and-coming vendors, heating up the competition while delivering innovative features that can be applied to specific scenarios, while offering great value.
Front Runners
Again, “Front Runners” are the most broadly applicable vendors. In other words, these vendors can cater to a range of use cases and can easily be scaled according to your own Salesforce requirements.
Gearset
Gearset is an elegant, intuitive, no-fuss solution for Salesforce DevOps.
Gearset offers several automation features to monitor changes being applied to your org, to schedule deployments and backups, as well as allow users to deploy hierarchical data between orgs – therefore, preserving any relationships.
Key Strengths
- Responsive UI: Built-in comparison tools make it easy to visualize, compare, and deploy differences between orgs, version control, and several other combinations which make this an easy solution to use.
- Metadata file handling: Gearset understands metadata files being pulled, parses them, and auto-resolves many common deployment errors and false positives, making the deployment experience smooth and more likely to succeed.
Setup & Administration
Gearset is a SaaS tool that has its own website where the customer’s account is created. From there, you will link Gearset to the desired Salesforce org/s.
This means that Gearset is up and running fast, using simple click-based configuration, such as connecting to Version control systems and ALM systems, e.g. JIRA.
Gearset’s customer support is very responsive and can be reached easily via chat from within the Gearset interface, making it easy to find solutions to common problems.
Copado
Copado is arguably the most versatile product in the Salesforce DevOps marketspace. Copado thrives on giving its users granular control, and tailors itself to the specific use case a customer might have across their multi-cloud Salesforce implementation.
Copado acts as a one-stop shop for DevOps needs with its ALM suite, Data Deployer, multi-cloud support, or a platform independent Robotic Testing offering.
Key Strengths
- Salesforce Multi-Cloud: Irrespective of which Salesforce product(s) you’re using, you’ll be able to deploy and move all the components from a single platform. This includes the obvious ones (Sales Cloud and Service Cloud) but also Experience Cloud, Vlocity, CPQ, B2B Commerce, and Marketing Cloud, etc.
- Quality Gates: Copado boasts several quality gates and testing abilities across its multi-cloud portfolio. This allows for supreme quality control while also presenting easy-to-review metrics on DevOps performance, allowing users to identify bottlenecks in their DevOps processes.
Setup & Administration
Copado is built on top of Salesforce, installed as a managed package within a customer’s production org.
Built on the Salesforce platform, naturally, Copado lowers the entry barrier for Salesforce Admins and low-code developers. In addition, this allows extensibility to further add layers of approval processes, workflows, and alter the page layouts to only see items that are relevant to your team.
Contenders
“Contenders” deliver powerful features while maintaining an intuitive admin experience, leading to a quicker time-to-value.
AutoRABIT
AutoRABIT is a well-established DevOps player in the Salesforce ecosystem. AutoRABIT’s partnerships with Ncino, Veeva, and Vlocity make it an easy choice for customers working with these packages.
AutoRABIT’s Vault solution offers flexible, templatable, full or incremental data and metadata backups, plus recovery options.
Key Strengths
- Environment management: Autorabit’s Environment management and orchestration automates post-deployment tasks such as moving Named Credentials, environment-specific custom labels, and other items that are not supported by the Metadata API. This is a huge benefit when looking to refresh and seed sandboxes.
- CodeScan by AutoRABIT: AutoRABIT recently acquired CodeScan, a Static code analysis solution that helps enable quality and security scanning for Salesforce along with the ability to visualize the quality/security health of your org.
Setup & Administration
AutoRABIT is a Saas tool and it can be either accessed through their website or, if needed, it can be deployed behind corporate firewalls as an on-premise solution.
Depending on the type of implementation, the setup requires the professional services team to set up and tailor AutoRABIT for the customer’s needs. They also have a growing learning academy that can be leveraged when training your internal team on how to use AutoRABIT.
Salesforce DevOps Center
Now in open Beta (as of June 2022), Salesforce DevOps Center aims to revamp the age-old change sets offered with the Salesforce platform, to all Salesforce customers.
Salesforce DevOps Center set out to bring advanced DevOps features like Version Control, ALM integration, and selective deployment, natively within the Salesforce platform.
Although it is limited in its functionality right now, it has great prospects of becoming the de facto DevOps solution for Salesforce.
Key Strengths
- Unique boxing and versioning approach to deploying metadata: Once metadata reaches a certain org, it’s bundled and versioned. This means that it can be moved to ‘higher’ orgs as a single piece.
- Leverages Salesforce internal APIs: As it has been developed by Salesforce, it can leverage Salesforce’s internal APIs, and work with other internal teams to ensure compatibility across clouds and metadata types.
Setup & Administration
DevOps Center would be offered as a managed package by Salesforce right now. Open for public Beta since June 2022, DevOps Center aims to have general availability (GA) in Fall 2022 (Safe Harbor).
Flosum
One of the highest-rated DevOps products on the AppExchange, Flosum is an innovative solution with trust at its core.
For the users who want to stay within the Salesforce ecosystem, alternatives to Version control, CI/CD, ALM tools, as well as code-quality analysis, are all built natively within the tool. Salesforce development is front of mind, as well as several integrations with third-party tools.
Supplemented within your Salesforce org, it’s therefore easier to onboard and train teams, and it also offers the flexibility to add/update/remove features that are not relevant.
Key Strengths
- Impact analysis: Flosum offers impact analysis capabilities that can help analyze the impact a deployment is going to make on the target org. This will enable your teams to conduct a risk assessment.
- No additional security reviews required: Built entirely on Salesforce, be it metadata or data, everything resides within the Salesforce org. Flosum has Salesforce-specific Version Control and CI/CD all built into your Salesforce org.
Setup & Administration
Flosum is a managed package that is usually installed in a separate Salesforce org to ensure Flosum’s processes do not slow down your production apps or business logic.
Being fully native to Salesforce, the benefits of customizing Flosum are helpful for changing the UI, as well as adding or removing approval layers.
Innovators
Innovators are up-and-coming vendors, heating up the competition while delivering innovative features that can be applied to specific scenarios, while offering great value.
Blue Canvas
Blue Canvas is a product designed to ensure that both its look and feel are familiar to low-code developers and admins who have been accustomed to using change sets.
Blue Canvas offer the ability to use Git as a type of setup audit trail by automatically creating metadata snapshots, and then cherry-picking changes to move to ‘higher’ orgs and bundle them into bigger releases.
Key Strengths
- Automatic org sync: Blue Canvas automatically keeps in sync the orgs that have been connected, allowing admins to directly make changes in the ‘higher’ orgs without having to think about whether the version control is out of sync.
- Blue Canvas API: Blue Canvas offers an API to make it extensible, and it can also be integrated with tools such as Slack.
Setup & Administration
Blue Canvas is built on top of AWS and uses Salesforce DX on the backend. You will access Blue Canvas via their website. It is easy to set up and has a minimal learning curve. However, if custom integrations have to be built, then it may take some time to set up using the Blue Canvas API.
Prodly
Prodly offers superior control for moving ‘reference’ data — the data that acts as configuration for packages like CPQ and Vlocity, but lives as Salesforce records in your org.
‘Reference’ data is relational and becomes challenging to move using Data Loader, and it can’t be moved through change sets. This is the gap that Prodly fills.
Prodly also has a suite of tools to cater to Salesforce DevOps needs for metadata migration and Sandbox management, as well as testing and governance.
Key Strengths
- Reference data: Prodly’s USP has been their capacity to move CPQ reference data records to and from environments.
- Source Control for reference data: Prodly has Source Control for reference data records, which can help keep backups, make rollbacks easier, and resolve conflicts.
Setup & Administration
Prodly is installed in your Salesforce production orgs. From there, connections to other orgs can be created.
You can start to create data sets in just a few clicks which will allow you to track, back up, roll back, and move reference data across environments.
Opsera
Opsera shines as a multi-technology DevOps tool. Salesforce CI/CD is part of their larger portfolio of DevOps offerings.
With its reach, Opsera integrates more tools than any other on this list, offering KPI monitoring, quality gates building, and CI/CD orchestration capabilities.
Opsera is up and coming in the Salesforce DevOps world and slowly bringing new features to compete at a larger scale with every new release.
Key Strengths
- Tech-stack scope: Opsera can act as a single DevOps tool for different technologies like Salesforce, AI/ML, and Service Now.
- Actionable insights: Opsera prides itself in being the one-stop shop to gain unified, actionable insights from all the DevOps products it is integrated into and orchestrates.
Setup & Administration
Opsera is a SaaS tool and, through their own website, can orchestrate the CI/CD setup for Salesforce using tools like Jenkins.
Opsera provides templates for Salesforce pipelines, as well as options for customizing Salesforce pipelines by integrating with Jenkins. Along with its pipeline capabilities, there are numerous options to set up different Git tasks, review logs of past deployments, create dashboards, and report on DORA metrics, as well as Garner details for reporting from tools such as SonarQube and Jira.
Summary
Finding the right third-party app could be the solution your team needs to help streamline complex DevOps scenarios. As set out above, there are plenty of options on the AppExchange to choose from – that’s where InVisory comes in.
Whether you’re conducting impact analysis or creating automation regression tests, you can utilize the vendor shortlist to identify which “front runner”, “contender”, or “innovator” is most aligned with your business requirements.
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