Your Ultimate Guide to Data Management Tools on the AppExchange

Whether you’re a Salesforce Admin ensuring clean CRM data for sales and service teams or an architect shaping your organization’s AI strategy, data reliability is key. While Salesforce provides native data management features, critical capabilities – such as data profiling, cleanup, and enrichment – have historically been augmented by ISV partners through the AppExchange.

While many solutions may claim to be the ultimate data management tool, no single vendor today offers a complete, end-to-end solution. The good news? Many AppExchange solutions complement each other, each addressing different aspects of data and metadata management.

This article seeks to guide Salesforce Admins, Architects, and Consultants to better understand, evaluate, and integrate AppExchange data management solutions and maintain high-quality, reliable data across their organizations.

Data vs. Metadata Management

Data and metadata management are distinct but complementary disciplines.

Data represents business content – accounts, contacts, transactions, and interactions that drive sales, service, and marketing. Metadata defines how that data is structured and managed, including object configurations, field settings, automation rules, and security policies.

For the purposes of this article, Metadata Management solutions generally fall into two categories:

• Metadata Analysis Tools: Solutions like Elements.cloud and Metazoa help document org configurations, track dependencies, and support change management. Meanwhile, tools like Hubbl focus on identifying object-level unused fields, security vulnerabilities, and outdated AppExchange packages, helping teams manage technical debt.
• Metadata Deployment & DevOps Tools: Solutions such as Copado and GearSet streamline metadata deployments, CI/CD pipelines, version control, and rollback capabilities – ensuring changes move safely from sandboxes to production.

These tools help maintain the technical health of your Salesforce environment, but they do not manage the business data itself.

The Need for Comprehensive Data Management

Imagine you’re the Salesforce Admin or Architect for a ten-year-old Salesforce CRM. Many key decisions were likely made long before you joined. Your users don’t trust the data and constantly complain about duplicates – when they can’t tell which of the three or four records to use, they just create another one.

You’ve tried different duplicate management approaches, but false matches keep occurring. Storage limits are creeping up, yet you haven’t had time to align business users on archival policies. System performance is suffering, and so is trust in your data.

Or you’re a consultant working with a new client. It’s week one, and you quickly realize none of the fields have descriptions or data sensitivity classifications. You know you can configure and deploy Agentforce or Data Cloud in weeks, but how do you help your customers assess, prioritize, clean, and maintain their data reliability?

These challenges are common, but without a comprehensive data management strategy, issues like duplicates, data decay, and unreliable insights only worsen over time.

To ensure your data is complete, consistent, current, correct, and compliant, you need data management solutions – which we’ll explore in the next section.

Understanding the Salesforce Data Management Landscape

Salesforce’s Customer Success Data Quality Management Framework outlines a three-phase approach to maintaining high-quality data:

1. Assess the current state of data to understand its quality, gaps, and improvement needs.
2. Baseline data reliability through data cleansing, standardization, or enrichment.
3. Monitor data to ensure data remains accurate, trusted, and actionable over time.

In alignment with this framework, AppExchange solutions play a critical role in data management, extending both for Salesforce CRM and, in some cases, Data Cloud’s data management features and capabilities.

The following categories outline key AppExchange solutions that support data profiling, cleanup, enrichment, compliance, and ongoing monitoring to help organizations establish and maintain reliable data.

Data Profiling

Data profiling solutions provide a statistical analysis of data set contents to understand the format, completeness, consistency, validity, and structure of the data. These insights are essential for maintaining high-quality, trusted data across Salesforce CRM and Data Cloud.

Imagine you’re a Salesforce Admin facing custom field limits on a heavily customized object. You need to:

• Identify unused custom fields that haven’t been populated in the past three years.
• Exclude recently added fields to avoid removing new configurations.
• Distinguish fields created manually vs. managed package fields.
• Prioritize field retirement based on usage dependencies and impact.

Manually building custom reports to analyze field fill rates would be incredibly time-consuming.  Since field usage patterns change over time, metadata analysis tools do not provide the necessary precision, such as recent or record-type usage analysis.

Data profiling tools streamline your analysis by offering prebuilt insights such as field fill rates, default value and distinct counts, and top and bottom value frequencies without requiring extensive technical skills. Depending on the tool, you can even compare observed data to configured metadata.

• Do you see values occurring frequently that are not part of the active picklist values? You may have a data consistency challenge.
• If you have active picklist values that are seldom or never used, you may have a usability or data model improvement opportunity.

Popular Data Profiling tools on AppExchange include Cuneiform, FieldPro, FieldSpy, and FieldTrip. All of these applications support Salesforce CRM object data analysis. Cuneiform can also profile data behind Data Cloud, including DLO, zero-copy, and DMO sources, complimenting Data Explorer.

Data Security and Compliance

Data Security and Compliance solutions help organizations protect sensitive information, mitigate risks, and ensure adherence to regulatory requirements. These tools provide visibility into data vulnerabilities, enforce classification policies, and implement encryption and masking techniques to secure business-critical data.

Imagine you’re a Salesforce Admin responsible for ensuring data security and regulatory compliance. Your organization collects customer PII, financial records, and proprietary business data, and you need to:

• Identify where sensitive data resides across objects and fields.
• Classify fields based on data sensitivity (e.g., PII, confidential, or unrestricted).
• Enforce security policies to restrict access to sensitive information.
• Implement encryption or masking to prevent unauthorized exposure.

While Salesforce provides role-based access controls, determining which data requires additional security measures can be complex. Security and compliance tools automate the process of detecting risks, classifying data, and enforcing policies. Depending on the solution, these tools provide:

• Data Vulnerability Analysis: Identifies exposed sensitive fields, potential security gaps, and compliance risks.
• Automated Sensitivity Classification: Helps categorize data (e.g., PII, financial, or internal-only) based on predefined policies.
• Encryption and Masking Enforcement: Solutions like Salesforce Shield and DataMask enable field-level encryption and data masking to protect customer information while maintaining usability.

Salesforce provides native security features, including Salesforce Shield, Data Detect, and Event Monitoring, to help organizations protect sensitive data and meet compliance requirements. Depending on your criteria, you can also consider solutions such as DataMask or Blackthorn.io as well.

By implementing these security solutions, organizations can proactively safeguard their data, ensure compliance, and reduce the risk of unauthorized exposure.

Backup and Archiving

Backup and Archiving solutions help organizations protect critical data, optimize storage, and ensure compliance with retention policies. These tools provide automated backups, long-term data retention, and secure recovery options to safeguard Salesforce environments against data loss, corruption, or accidental deletions.

Imagine you’re a Salesforce Admin responsible for data protection and system performance. Your organization must:

• Ensure regular backups to prevent data loss from accidental deletions, integration failures, or security incidents.
• Manage data retention policies to comply with industry regulations while optimizing storage costs.
• Archive or purge records that impact system performance without losing critical historical data.
• Facilitate data seeding for testing, training, or migration between environments.

Salesforce provides Recycle Bin and field history tracking, but these features have limitations on retention time, data coverage, and recovery flexibility.  

AppExchange solutions such as Own, Capstorm, Flossum, Grax, and Odaseva automate backup, archival, and recovery processes, with many benefits, including:

• CRM storage cost and performance optimization
• Improved usability
• Reducing Data Cloud costs and AI hallucination risks by ensuring only relevant data is retained or used in systems of engagement

By implementing robust backup and archiving solutions, organizations can protect their data, optimize storage, and maintain compliance with industry regulations.

Data Cleanup

Now that you have purged or archived data that is not needed in your org, you can focus on ensuring that the remaining data is complete, consistent, and correct.

Data cleanup solutions help organizations identify and resolve inaccurate, duplicate, or inconsistent data. While they cannot ensure long-term data accuracy, they provide the tools to detect and correct data quality issues at scale.

Imagine you’re a Salesforce Admin reviewing customer records and discovering widespread duplicates. What’s worse, you have many instances of “na@na.com” or “555-555-5555” in your contact point fields due to validation rules that require email and phone fields to be populated. You must: 

• Remove verifiably bad data to avoid false matches and to discover how many records are even matchable
• Determine your data unification strategy, especially if you have intentional versus unintentional duplicates in your org
• Automate ongoing data cleanup 

While Salesforce Duplicate Management offers basic controls, they may miss complex duplicates and lack bulk cleanup capabilities. 

Solutions such as Apsona, DataGroomr, DemandTools, and Plauti extend Salesforce CRM’s capabilities with advanced duplicate detection, bulk data corrections, and automated cleanup processes. Furthermore, Salesforce Data Cloud’s unified profile offers you an alternative path to merging duplicates.

Do not forget data cleanup is not just for customer profiles. If you perform a data migration or org merge, you may need to standardize historical values to comply with the latest data standards. 

By implementing data cleanup solutions, organizations can address data inconsistencies, improve usability, and enhance CRM efficiency – ensuring users work with cleaner, more reliable data.

Data Enrichment

Data enrichment solutions enhance the completeness and accuracy of Salesforce records by integrating external or internal reference data.

This process enables organizations to validate, standardize, and augment key data points, creating a more comprehensive view of customers, businesses, donors, and their contact details. By enriching data, teams can drive better decision-making, improve segmentation, and deliver more personalized engagement. Common use cases for Data Enrichment are:

Contact Point Validation and Standardization

Enrichment tools ensure the accuracy of essential contact information like email addresses, phone numbers, and mailing addresses. For example:

• Email Validation: Identify invalid or inactive email addresses to reduce bounce rates and maintain sender reputation.
• Phone Number Standardization: Format phone numbers correctly for different regions, ensuring consistent communication across global audiences.
• Address Validation: Verify and format addresses using postal standards (e.g., USPS for the U.S.) to reduce delivery failures.

Company and Business Contact Enrichment

Organizations often need to match and enrich company data with firmographic insights or add missing details to contact profiles. Common enrichment examples include:

• Firmographics: Enhance account records with industry, revenue, employee count, and location data as well as business hierarchies using sources such as D&B and Moody’s.
• Contact Data: Supplement business contact records with titles, direct phone numbers, and email addresses using tools like ZoomInfo.

Donor and Consumer Demographics

For nonprofits and consumer-focused organizations, enrichment can uncover valuable demographic and behavioral data. Tools like DonorSearch and Experian provide insights such as:

• Wealth Indicators: Household income, philanthropic history, and giving capacity for donor targeting.
• Demographic Attributes: Age, gender, and lifestyle preferences to enhance consumer profiles for segmentation.

Imagine you’re a Salesforce Admin preparing for a marketing campaign targeting SMBs in specific industries. You previously identified gaps in your data and your sales reps neither have the time nor knowledge to fill in all the missing details about your historical accounts and contacts.

By leveraging data enrichment solutions, you can:

• Validate and standardize email addresses to ensure high deliverability.
• Enrich account records with industry classifications and employee size for precise segmentation.
• Update missing contact details, such as direct phone numbers, to enable your sales team to reach decision-makers faster.

With enriched, standardized, and validated data, you ensure your campaigns are accurate, targeted, and effective.

Data Monitoring

Data monitoring solutions provide continuous oversight of your data quality, ensuring that it remains reliable, consistent, and actionable over time. 

By tracking data quality KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), monitoring trends, and setting up alerts, organizations can proactively identify and address emerging issues before they impact business operations or customer trust.

Data Quality KPI Dashboards enable Admins and stakeholders to visualize key data quality metrics at a glance. These metrics provide insights into critical aspects such as:

• Completeness: Percentage of records with missing or incomplete fields (e.g., email addresses, phone numbers, or account industry details).
• Consistency: Identify discrepancies, such as mismatched picklist values or improperly formatted data.
• Validity: Track adherence to business rules, such as ensuring email addresses are in a valid format or phone numbers meet regional standards.

Data Trend Monitoring and Alerts help identify patterns or anomalies that could signal emerging problems. For example:

• Trend Analysis: Detection increases in duplicate records or unexpected field value changes.
• Alerts: Automate notifications for specific thresholds, such as a spike in incomplete customer records or a drop in data quality scores.
• Root Cause Identification: Combine data monitoring with metadata analysis to pinpoint sources of quality issues, such as faulty integrations or process misconfigurations.

Salesforce Data Quality Dashboards is the most popular point-in-time dashboard solution, while Cuneiform provides business scenario-specific trend monitoring capability controlled by Flow templates.

By leveraging data monitoring tools, you create a scalable process for maintaining high-quality data and building trust across your organization.

AppExchange Solutions Working Together

Even the messiest Salesforce org can be transformed by combining tools from different data management categories. Here’s how:

Evaluating AppExchange Solutions

In many of the categories, we had multiple candidates to choose from.  When selecting AppExchange tools, it’s essential to evaluate them across several critical dimensions to ensure they align with your organization’s needs. Here’s a quick guide to the key factors you should assess:

1. Security Posture

• Data Storage: Confirm where data is stored (within Salesforce or externally) and how data is processed.
• Compliance and Certifications: To meet your industry’s regulatory requirements, look for certifications such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, or GDPR compliance.
• Security Review: Check when the vendor’s Salesforce security review was last conducted and whether updates align with Salesforce’s latest security standards.

2. Features

• Capabilities: Evaluate whether the solution’s features address your specific use cases (e.g., data profiling, enrichment, monitoring).
• Performance: Assess how the tool handles large data volumes and complex orgs.
• Usability: Look for intuitive interfaces that minimize admin learning curves.
• Lightning Compatibility: Ensure the tool is fully optimized for Salesforce Lightning.
• Salesforce Features: Verify whether the vendor supports the latest Salesforce advancements, such as Data Cloud objects or Flow integrations.

3. Cost

• Licensing Model: Understand the pricing structure – per user, org, or record volume – and whether it aligns with your data needs.
• Freemium Path: Check if the vendor offers a free trial or freemium version to test capabilities before committing.
• Value for Cost: Ensure the cost reflects the ROI, factoring in potential operational efficiencies or risk mitigation.

4. Support

• Support Channels: Confirm the availability of support options like email, Slack, and their responsiveness.
• SLAs: Look for documented service-level agreements to guarantee response times.
• Enablement: Assess whether the vendor provides proactive support, such as training sessions or advisory services, to teach not just product features but how to achieve your business outcomes.

Final Thoughts

The Salesforce data management landscape is rich with tools designed to address specific challenges, from profiling and cleaning data to enriching and monitoring its quality. While no single solution offers a complete, end-to-end approach, the right combination of tools from the AppExchange can transform even the most chaotic Salesforce org into a reliable, efficient, and scalable system.

When evaluating solutions, it’s crucial to go beyond familiarity and past experience. The Salesforce platform evolves rapidly, particularly with innovations in Data Cloud and AI. Newer tools may better align with your organization’s current and future needs, delivering enhanced capabilities and more seamless integration with Salesforce’s latest features.

By thoughtfully assessing security, features, cost, and support and leveraging complementary solutions across categories, you can create a data management strategy that ensures clean, enriched, and reliable data. This foundation will not only drive operational efficiency but also empower your organization to unlock actionable insights, elevate customer experiences, and support strategic growth.

With the right data management tools and strategy, you’re not just managing data – you’re enabling your organization to achieve its business goals with confidence and clarity.