Salesforce DevOps is the most discussed & wanted feature by all organizations that use Salesforce CRM. But have you ever wondered what is the right product and how to judge if that is the best fit? In this article, we will explore various DevOps offerings that are available, their advantages and disadvantages & what is best for you.

As of today, some of the most popular Salesforce DevOps products are:

Copado
Salesforce DevOps Center
Gearset

Apart from these products, there is also an option to implement DevOps with traditional version control systems like Azure, Github, Bitbucket and even Jenkins. If you are wondering why products other than those listed above are not featured in this blog, well it’s not a coincidence rather it’s a fact.

1. Copado

Copado has been a game changer in the salesforce DevOps space. Copado is built natively in Salesforce and hence offers all compliance, security and regulatory policies that Salesforce guarantees.

Aspect	Observation
Price	Very High (similar to Salesforce user licensing model)
Best Suited For	Medium & Enterprise organizations
User Friendliness	Excellent
Platform	Built on Force.com Platform
Learning Materials	Available on Copado Academy (similar to how Salesforce works)
Credentials	Copado has its certifications (similar to how Salesforce operates)
Features	Pipelines, Environment Sync, User Stories, Quality Gates, Copado CLI
Maintenance	As Copado is a managed package, it needs to be upgraded when new updates are available
Need for a DevOps Team	Yes. Even though you get all these features, you need a qualified DevOps team to help teams manage releases & help resolve conflicts
Ability to extend the basic functionality	Yes. As this is a managed package, you can develop custom functionality on top of the objects Copado provides
Support	Copado has an excellent customer support (similar to Salesforce)

As you can spot easily, Copado adopts the Salesforce business style and thus every aspect of Copado is very similar to Salesforce.

What are the benefits of using Copado?

As long as you have the money, onboarding and setup are very fast
You can start with just 1 DevOps admin
Since Copado is like the Salesforce king, customer support and guidance are very responsive. So, you won’t feel lost.
Their customer success team and account executives are highly responsive to your requests.
They can provide you with certification vouchers and group discounts at will.
Copado Academy has some courses that anyone can take free of cost but at the end, it will ask you to pay since the last module is a certification module.
Their UI-first approach makes it easy for Developers and Administrators to use the product without any DevOps knowledge.
Teams with clearly defined Agile/Scrum Project Management Methodology and have clear-cut visibility into what is delivered in a Sprint and what composes a Release + having a well-defined release cadence will love Copado.

What are the pain points of using Copado?

Even though Copado has lots of positives, it is not bulletproof. Some of the common problems are :
- User Stories not syncing from any ALM tools to Salesforce.
- Unrelated metadata appearing in commits.
- Promotions getting stuck.
- Environment Sync into Developer sandboxes sometimes rips out what developers have developed so far.
- Any customized extension on top of Copado causing some hiccups is stamped as “Cannot be Supported” by the customer support team (so you will be hand-holded until they spot a customization & then you will be abandoned).
- They recommend their partners to implement Copado for their customers (this can be a pricey affair).
- Copado does not support JEST tests used for LWC (Lightning Web Components). So it is impossible to commit JEST tests. Copado recommends an ugly way to do so but it is not a standard/scalable approach.
- Teams trying to mature their Project Management methodologies where ad-hoc priority changes derail what is scoped in a Sprint (that in turn affects your release cadence), Copado can be overwhelming. For example, Feature 1 is scoped to go out in Sprint 1 and Feature 2 in Sprint 2. Now, the business decides that the first part of Feature 1 and the last part of Feature 2 is of high priority and should be released in Sprint 1. It becomes challenging to strip out and attach individual pieces of functionality.

Words of Wisdom: Copado might not be the best for Startups and Small Businesses when you are on the journey to stabilize your business towards profit making. Once you become a Medium/Large Enterprise, Copado will not feel expensive and hence it will look promising to your business.

Understanding the pros and cons of Copado will help you better prepare for what you are about to adopt. It’s not a wrong thing for a product to have cons. Nobody is perfect but it is encouraging to see Copado is mitigating these issues in their product roadmap and maturing ahead. This is precisely why Copado is one hell of a competition in the Salesforce DevOps space.

2. Gearset

Gearset is a deployment solution for teams to compare, choose and deploy metadata across Salesforce orgs. A better way to say is ‘Change Sets on steroids‘. Thus, it is not a pure DevOps product. So, why are we talking about Gearset when it is not a DevOps product?

Look at the value proposition. Gearset is best suited for teams who want to accelerate the deployment process.

Anyone who talks about DevOps is usually referring to automating deployments to salesforce org/environments. This part of automating deployments is just one aspect of DevOps and is called DevOps Developer Services. Gearset caters to the DevOps Developer Services layer of End-to-end DevOps offerings and that is why it is not a pure DevOps solution.

Aspect	Observation
Price	Low
Best Suited For	Small & Medium Scale organizations
User Friendliness	Good
Platform	Built out of Salesforce (it connects to Salesforce via OAuth)
Learning Materials	Free of cost. Product Documentation & guide is available on their website
Credentials	None
Features	Deployment, Sandbox Seeding, Backup, Automate Release, Support for CPQ, Revenue Cloud and Industries Cloud
Maintenance	Product and its features are maintained by Gearset. You have to maintain what you customize in Gearset.
Need for a DevOps Team	No
Ability to extend the basic functionality	No
Support	Mostly product documentation web page will have answers. On-call support is average.

What are the benefits of using Gearset?

If your team has been using Changeset for so long and makes mistakes while promoting metadata, then Gearset can help make improvements in this process.
Gearset has an easy and nice UI that shows you the differences in metadata between source org & destination org and helps make better decisions.
Supports Git-based version control
As it makes deployments easier, it does make rollbacks easier too.
Gearset keeps a history of all the changes you make in the journey of promoting a change. Thus, it’s easier to know what we did right and what did wrong.
Automate deployments via pipelines.
Support for data deployment.
Support for Backup and Restore

What are the pain points of using Gearset?

Integration capabilities are limited
Not for organizations looking to scale with a huge program plan & roadmap of projects running over each other
The extent of customization supported is moderate
Support experience is average

Words of Wisdom: If you looking to accelerate Continuos Delivery across your Salesforce org, then Gearset is a good choice.

3. Salesforce DevOps Center

Salesforce DevOps Center (Salesforce’s solution to DevOps) is a strong contender for all DevOps products and solutions out there. Even though this product is at its early stage and considering the speed of innovation at Salesforce, Salesforce DevOps Center will evolve soon to replace all other products like Gearset and Copado.

Aspect	Observation
Price	Zero
Best Suited For	Small, Medium and Large Scale organizations
User Friendliness	Excellent
Platform	Natively available in Salesforce platform
Learning Materials	Trailhead (free of cost)
Credentials	None as of now
Features	Pipeline, Environment Sync, Git-based Version Control, User Stories, Release Management & Bundling
Maintenance	Product and its features are maintained by Salesforce. You have to maintain what you customize.
Need for a DevOps Team	No
Ability to extend the basic functionality	None
Support	Standard Salesforce Support used for Salesforce customers

Setting up the Salesforce DevOps Center is very easy and requires very little technical know-how to do so.

What are the benefits of using Salesforce DevOps Center?

Supports user story-based development
Supports scratch org or sandbox development model
Easy to setup
No code & configurable product
Admin & Business User friendly
Developer-friendly (VS Code IDE)
Supports all Git-based Version Control Systems
Ability to bundle user stories into a release
Shows how much an environment is out of sync and helps resolve that
No need for a DevOps Team. Your Salesforce Admin can manage this on their own.

What are the pain points of using Salesforce DevOps Center?

Rollback capability is missing (it will soon be addressed by Salesforce)
Scheduling a deployment is missing
Automatic deployments are missing
No support for Quality Gates as of today

Words of Wisdom: Do not underestimate the power of the Salesforce DevOps Center. It will evolve as the king of Salesforce DevOps and rule out every other product in the market very soon.

4. Traditional YAML Pipelines

If you are an organization that uses Azure/Github/Bitbucket for other tech stacks and still uses Salesforce for CRM needs, leveraging YAML pipelines in your existing Version Control system might be a good choice. The reason we said “might be” is because with Salesforce DevOps Center natively being offered free out of the box in the Salesforce CRM, you can leverage Salesforce DevOps Center for Salesforce CRM-related development & enhancements and use traditional YAML pipelines for other tech stacks. This technique reduces the need to set up a full-fledged DevOps setup in YAML for Salesforce.

Aspect	Observation
Price	Depends on whether you have in-house expertise or not
Best Suited For	Small, Medium and Large Scale organizations
User Friendliness	Developer friendly. Not for admins or business users
Platform	Pipeline features are available natively on the Version Control System
Learning Materials	Have to depend on community blogs/posts, YouTube videos, etc
Credentials	None
Features	Any feature can be developed, provided the right experts work on it
Maintenance	Very Low
Need for a DevOps Team	Yes
Ability to extend the basic functionality	Highly Extensible
Support	Your own DevOps Team should support this

YAML Pipeline is not a full DevOps setup. It will only bring CI/CD (which means validation & deployment across Salesforce org by still maintaining a history of changes in branches existing in Version Control Systems). You definitely can add more jobs and steps in your YAML pipeline to add code analysis, linting, automation tests, etc.

Getting this done in YAML for Salesforce is a bit different from how you do code validation & deployment for C#, Java, and NodeJS projects. Apps developed on programming languages like C#, Java, NodeJS, etc all have compilers locally on your machine. But for Salesforce, no apex code or out-of-the-box configuration can be compiled locally. It all has to be saved/compiled on the cloud platform directly. Therefore, the approach fully changes.

This is why having the right experts to do this setup is very important. We have heard stories of organizations where their app teams who successfully developed pipelines for React-based projects were asked to do Salesforce pipelines and they entirely screwed it up. Right experts mean Senior Architects/Leads/Organizations specialized in Salesforce Cloud with rich experience in DevOps.

What are the benefits of using Traditional YAML Pipelines?

Highly scalable & extensible
Ability to add more steps in your DevOps process (like quality gates, linting, code analysis, etc)
Leverages Git-based Version Control System
Any functionality related to Salesforce CI/CD can be developed
Environment Landscape (if done rightly) can be used to migrate from Traditional YAML pipelines to any other DevOps products

What are the pain points of using Traditional YAML Pipelines?

Requires the right experts to set this up for the first time
Requires a Salesforce DevOps team to maintain and manage the health of pipelines
YAML pipeline-based DevOps is only developer friendly but not admin/business friendly
Support is very limited hence this is custom development and very less blogs/articles are there

Verdict

For Startups and Small Scale Organizations, the best choice is Salesforce DevOps Center for Salesforce CRM
For Medium Scale Organizations, the best choice is Salesforce DevOps Center/Gearset for Salesforce CRM & Traditional YAML Pipelines for other tech stacks
For Large/Enterprise Scale Organizations, the best choice is Copado for Salesforce CRM