Top 5 Startups Leading the Salesforce Devops Surge

As the United States emerges from pandemic restrictions, signs of the Salesforce devops surge are everywhere. The strongest signal yet is the emergence of the Top 5 startup software vendors who offer Salesforce devops management platforms.

Mission: Speed Up Salesforce App Production

In this industry status report, I present the Top 5 Salesforce Devops independent software vendors. These mission-driven startups use devops principles plus sophisticated, Salesforce-specific capabilities to help their customers speed up Salesforce software development.

Here is the definition of a distinguishing feature found in Salesforce devops platforms that was used to qualify vendors for the Top 5 list:

A Salesforce devops platform periodically ingests the metadata of a Salesforce org, stores that metadata in a database, and then uses that information to run, manage and optimize the Salesforce release management process.

Having an org’s metadata managed with a database lets these systems speed up Salesforce development. For example, some Salesforce devops platforms simulate metadata deployments, which anticipates and mitigates errors with fewer iterations. This feature, among others, is what distinguishes Salesforce devops platforms from traditional devops systems.

In Salesforce devops, pipelines are different because they focus on changing the state of a live system instead of artifact generation. As I’ve written before, there are excellent source-based methodologies for preparing deployments and developing new Salesforce implementations. But, to reliably manage complex source code deployments to a large org with active admins, a smart metadata platform is required.

Who Uses These Platforms?

These platforms have proven their worth as Salesforce customers have moved to using Salesforce as a digital transformation platform. Some of Salesforce’s biggest customers use these platforms to help untangle orgs that are 10-plus years old. And, much less frequently, they are used to start up new orgs “the right way.” Salesforce devops platforms help improve their Salesforce app production capabilities with better governance, application lifecycle management, release management, plus other devops features that improves agility and metrics.

The Top 5 Salesforce devops platform vendors all appear to have significant new customer pipelines and are fielding interest in their services from the largest of enterprises. And the pricing for these services may seem high to average Salesforce platform owners, but most of the Top 5’s customers are paying very high Salesforce license fees already, so those customers seem ready to pay just a little more to make app production go faster.

Not all of the vendors focus exclusively on bigger enterprises. If you are shopping for a smaller devops solution, please don’t be put off by stories of high prices. Some of these companies have educational centers designed to attract beginners, which indicates that those vendors are interested in helping the 10s of thousands of orgs that need better app production management.

But, if you can’t buy a full solution, you may still be able to move your Salesforce devops program forward by using some of the Free Open Source Software tools found on the Salesforce Devops ISVs and Tools List.

Make Your Salesforce Devops Management Map

The complexity of making a build-vs-buy decision and then choosing between these vendors in an indication of how intricate and involved Salesforce devops has become. When making any system choice, Salesforce architects should keep the Salesforce Devops Industry Map in mind to ensure a complete solution is made.

Top 5 Salesforce Devops Vendors

Presented alphabetically with vendor-supplied descriptions, this list is offered as a starting point for architects and platform owners on their Salesforce devops journey.

AutoRABIT

AutoRABIT is an all-in-one release management platform for Salesforce developers, admins, analysts, and release managers with ready-to-use static code analysis, data backup and recovery, version control, deployment, testing, data loading, and sandbox management. AutoRABIT is a leading Salesforce DevOps solution for businesses operating in regulated industries due to a unique set of data security capabilities, including the option to deploy the AutoRABIT solution on-prem or in private cloud (in addition to the standard cloud-hosted option). With AutoRABIT, teams can achieve higher release velocity and substantially improve time to market without sacrificing code quality or data security.

Vendor-Supplied Description

Blue Canvas

Blue Canvas is a Git-oriented DevOps solution for Salesforce. Our unique focus is on velocity and simplicity. We bring all the tools you need to do pull requests, code reviews, merging, diffing, and auditing in one place. There is no need for extra tooling or professional services to get up and running – Blue Canvas just works out of the box – though you can extend the platform via our APIs. Our Git-based architecture allows customers like Slack, Sysco and SurveyMonkey to move quickly and meet their project goals. Our admin-friendly, Lightning-based UI is easy to learn and makes onboarding and adoption simple. This translates into real velocity for your Salesforce developers and admins while keeping application quality high.

Vendor-Supplied Description

Copado

Copado is the #1 native DevOps solution for Salesforce. The Copado platform supports Salesforce, Vlocity, Heroku, MuleSoft and other clouds with a fully customizable user interface.

Vendor-Supplied Description

Flosum

Flosum is a complete DevOps and Data Management solution for Salesforce. It helps organizations overcome challenges faced by Salesforce developers, admins, and IT leadership. Folsom’s 100% fully native version control solution outperforms changesets or complex Git-based approaches. Customers increase development team productivity, accelerate release velocity, and improve release quality while maintaining the tightest security and governance standards. The data backup, restore, and archival solution allows organizations to stay in control of Salesforce data with automated backups, data comparison, GDPR and CCPA compliance, full or partial restore options, data/metadata relationship maintenance, and top-of-the-line support, while the Data Migrator solution enables developers to move complete or sub-sets of data at lightning speed, preserving parent-child relationships.

Vendor-Supplied Description

Gearset

Gearset is a complete DevOps solution for Salesforce, offering deployment tools for metadata and data, automation tools for testing, monitoring and CI/CD, as well as backup. Gearset has thousands of users worldwide – the largest community of Salesforce professionals practicing DevOps on the platform. They see the highest rates of deployment success in the ecosystem, thanks to the Gearset intelligent deployment engine that powers its full suite of DevOps tools.  Gearset is helping teams of all sizes to implement best-practice DevOps and set up workflows that suit their unique requirements. Its product roadmap is shaped by feedback from users, who can speak to Gearset developers and support engineers within minutes.

Vendor-Supplied Description