Managing Salesforce at scale isn’t simple. What began as a simple CRM has since become the backbone of business operations for more than 150,000 companies worldwide. But the huge customization potential of Salesforce comes with challenges — development teams often struggle to keep up with business demand while managing increasingly complex environments.
When hundreds of admins, developers, and stakeholders contribute across multiple orgs, it can be hard to find the right balance between the speed, quality, and control of releases. Manual tools like change sets or the command line can’t keep up with modern delivery demands, leaving teams exposed to compliance risk, hours of rework, and stressful release delays.
Gearset fixes that — giving teams a single, intelligent DevOps platform to manage Salesforce processes reliably, and at scale.
Why Salesforce can cause friction for enterprises
For fast-moving global organizations, Salesforce’s flexibility is both its power and its pitfall. As teams and business units expand, four problems emerge:
1. Complexity without visibility
Each new org, sandbox, and integration adds another layer of risk. With thousands of metadata components and dependencies, one small misstep can ripple across environments. With a large team, the lack of visibility makes it hard to know when, and where, things break.
2. Parallel development chaos
Large, distributed teams, who are working at different speeds and across different locations and timezones, regularly report that releases have become a bottleneck. Merge conflicts pile up and deployments become unpredictable and error-prone.
3. Balancing speed with quality and security
Enterprises need agility to respond quickly to changes, but they also operate under strict governance, data residency, and audit requirements. Manual workflows can’t deliver speed and compliance at the same time.
4. Fragmented toolchains and complex integrations
Integrating multi-cloud setups with complex configurations, alongside version control and automation platforms, adds overhead and friction. Each system speaks its own language, making standardization across orgs difficult.
These challenges make it difficult to scale DevOps effectively — but by standardizing processes, aligning global teams, and tracking delivery performance, enterprises can regain control and drive continuous improvement across every Salesforce org.
The solution: DevOps for Salesforce
For most teams, the breakthrough is DevOps — establishing an end-to-end lifecycle of planning, development, testing, release, and continuous insight — to bring discipline and predictability to Salesforce operations.
Salesforce DevOps isn’t exactly like DevOps on other platforms. Managing infrastructure, scalability, hosting, and testing is all handled by Salesforce itself. But the basic aim remains the same as DevOps for any platform: to break down silos so that everyone involved in building new features is also empowered to help release those features to Salesforce.
The overarching challenge is clear: enterprises won’t get the value they want from Salesforce without adopting DevOps.
DevOps transforms Salesforce delivery from manual to manageable:
- Continuous integration validates every change before release, enabling more reliable, frequent deployments.
- Automated testing catches regressions early and prevents broken dependencies from reaching production.
- Version control establishes a single source of truth, improving collaboration and reducing release risk.
- Observability and backup provide resilience — helping teams proactively spot issues and restore quickly when things go wrong.
For enterprises relying on Salesforce to run core operations, DevOps isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s a requirement to deliver safely at the speed the business demands.
But applying DevOps to Salesforce isn’t straightforward. Traditional DevOps tools simply weren’t built for the platform’s metadata-driven architecture. What enterprises need is a DevOps solution purpose-built for Salesforce — one that’s designed specifically to handle the nuances and complexity of the Salesforce platform.
Choosing the right Salesforce DevOps platform
The DevOps lifecycle is the gold-standard of DevOps, making is a great guide for assessing the best next steps to work towards a complete DevOps process. The lifecycle doesn’t imply a specific set of tools and workflows, and that’s important. Each team will need their own setup, and will need workflows that match the makeup of their team and business context.
But without giving a prescriptive checklist of tools, it’s still useful to be aware of different categories of tooling for Salesforce DevOps:
| Tooling category | Description |
| Ticketing (“ALM”) | Assign development tasks and track their progress through to completion — usually up to release. |
| Org intelligence | Analyze your metadata to understand the current state of your org, so that you can plan changes effectively and accurately understand their impact on production |
| Test automation | Run unit and UI tests to ensure code and config function as intended. Test during development and continue testing in production. |
| Automated code reviews | Get config and code analysis throughout development, flagging issues with security, quality, and consistency. |
| Sandbox seeding | Migrate production data to lower environments so that testing orgs replicate real-world environments. Mask records for security and compliance. |
| Deployments | Eliminate manual change tracking, simplify deployments, and enable rollbacks. |
| Version control | Collaborate within and across teams, without treading on each other’s toes. |
| Pipelines | Implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) to automate testing and promotion through the release pipeline. |
| Backup | Protect your data and metadata with regular, automated backups and a tested restore process. |
| Archiving | Remove obsolete data from your org to reduce data storage costs and improve data quality, while remaining compliant. |
| Observability | Proactively catch issues in production such as Flow and Apex errors, and use the insights to plan future improvements. |
| Auditing | Keep a record of who has changed what, to meet compliance requirements. |
| Reporting | Monitor DevOps performance improvements, e.g. using the DORA metrics, so you can demonstrate business impact and Salesforce ROI. |
Why enterprises choose Gearset as their DevOps platform
Gearset is the complete Salesforce DevOps platform, trusted by over 3,000 enterprise teams — including Zurich, McKesson, and Veolia — to deliver continuous, compliant change at global scale.
“Gearset has helped us take control of our platform, our releases, and our products. We’re forecasting 500% ROI in our first year — and more every year after that.”
— Paul Watkeys, Head of Digital Products, Veolia
Gearset brings together every stage of the DevOps lifecycle — plan, build, test, validate, release, operate, and observe — into one secure, unified platform.
How Gearset solves the enterprise challenge
Enterprises face growing complexity across Salesforce environments — from sprawling org architectures to strict compliance requirements and global collaboration. Gearset brings every part of the DevOps lifecycle under one platform, helping teams move faster, stay compliant, and deliver change with total confidence.
Automated testing, integrated with your release pipeline
Gearset’s CI/CD Pipelines allows teams to automate deployments and testing, drastically reducing time and effort spent on manual work. Visual workflows, built-in validation, and quality gates replace manual, error-prone, and fragile scripts.
Multi-cloud support you can trust
Gearset delivers end-to-end automation across every Salesforce cloud. The enterprise-ready platform unifies CI/CD pipelines, test automation, metadata deployments, backups and observability to keep your multi-cloud development process fast, compliant, and reliable.
Strict governance and compliance
Gearset gives enterprises built-in audit trails, SOX/ISO/HIPAA support, and parallel pipelines for global teams — all within a single platform. Combined with SSO/SAML, role-based permissions, and granular approvals, teams can maintain governance without slowing delivery.
Reliable recovery and resilient backups
Automatic backups combined with robust restore workflows keeps both metadata and data safe — giving enterprises instant recovery from errors, deletions, or corruption.
Smarter decisions with AI-powered insights
The Gearset Agent adds an agentic layer of insight. Ask, “What impact will changing this Flow have?” or “Which fields haven’t been used in 12 months?” — and get intelligent, context-aware answers drawn from your org in real-time.
Supporting every stage of the Salesforce DevOps lifecycle
The DevOps lifecycle represents a complete, connected vision of software delivery. Rather than a series of isolated stages, it’s a cohesive model where each phase strengthens and accelerates the others — making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Gearset powers every stage of this lifecycle, delivering an end-to-end toolset built for modern enterprise DevOps.
- Plan: Gearset’s Org Intelligence solution gives teams complete visibility into the architecture of every Salesforce org. Instantly map dependencies, relationships, and change history to understand how components connect and where risk lies. With clear architectural insight, teams can design smarter changes, plan scalable releases, and align strategy across global teams before work begins.
- Build: Teams collaborate more effectively using version control and shared pipelines, allowing rapid development without blocking each other or disrupting work already in flight.
- Validate: Automated testing, code reviews and dependency analysis catch issues early, shifting quality left and reducing risk.
- Release: Gearset transforms releases from high-stress events into predictable, repeatable workflows. With a single command center for your entire release process, every team — no matter where or how they work — can collaborate seamlessly and deploy with confidence.
- Operate: With Gearset’s integrated backup and restore, off-platform archiving, and role-based permissions, enterprises maintain governance and control across production orgs. Backups protect both data and metadata, archiving keeps live systems performing and compliant, and transparent audit trails and restores help rapid recovery and operational resilience.
- Observe: Gearset’s observability and change-tracking solutions give teams deep visibility into system behavior after every release. Instead of simply monitoring for errors, teams can trace issues back to specific changes, understand root causes, and identify opportunities to continuously improve performance and reliability.
Supporting the full DevOps lifecycle in one unified platform is what enables Gearset to help enterprises ship better Salesforce changes — faster, safer, and with complete visibility.
Why now and why Gearset?
Salesforce is evolving fast, with new clouds, new architecture, and Agentforce all reshaping how enterprise teams build and release. The reality is that many organizations are still relying on spreadsheets, scripts, and toolchains that don’t really fit together, slowing delivery and making compliance harder to maintain.
Gearset solves these pains by giving teams one secure, unified platform to manage the entire DevOps lifecycle. You get complete visibility into what to build, what’s changing, reliable automation where it matters, and the governance safeguards enterprises depend on. Global teams can work in parallel without stepping on each other’s toes, and releases stop being panicked and down to the wire. With Gearset, teams plan changes properly, test early, deploy cleanly, and track the impact of every release — delivering the best features to end users with speed, confidence, and control.
Try Gearset now with a 30-day free trial.
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