5 Reasons Salesforce Developers Choose ClickDeploy Over Changesets

As Salesforce administrators and developers, we’re all familiar with the strengths and limitations of changesets. Salesforce’s built-in changesets enable us to migrate configurations from one org to another, but their pain points become apparent as soon as we try to deploy to more than a few orgs or collaborate with multiple team members and project teams. There’s no simple way to merge changesets with our master source code, and when it comes to building an effective pipeline for continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), changesets can often be the slowest and most cumbersome link in our toolchain.

Enter ClickDeploy. With its powerful integration with version control repositories and easy-to-use interface, ClickDeploy makes quick work of deployment and CI/CD challenges where changesets fall short. Here are the top five reasons why leading Salesforce admins and developers choose ClickDeploy over changesets.

1. Greater Ability to Intuitively Select and Compare Deployment Components

We’ve all been through the tedious process of adding components one by one from drop-down menus to create a Salesforce changeset. And though we can select the components to include in a changeset, we have no effective way to see the feature changes that these components represent.

By contrast, ClickDeploy displays all components by metadata type in a single list view which can be sorted and filtered as needed. We can easily select individual components for deployment or select all displayed components at once with a single click.

Color-coded Diff icons also show us at a glance which components contain differences in relation to the target org. Clicking an icon opens the Diff Viewer for a line-by-line comparison of new and existing component code, with the areas of change clearly highlighted. ClickDeploy does better than changesets by enabling us to review exactly how and where changes will affect our target org, whether we’re assembling components for acceptance testing or about to go live in a production environment.

2. Git Repositories as Sources and Targets

With ClickDeploy, our source and target environments aren’t just limited to Salesforce orgs. We can also deploy code changes directly to and from a version control repository such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or Azure DevOps.

ClickDeploy’s robust integration with a source code repository is central to its CI/CD and release management capabilities. With the connections to our Salesforce orgs and Git repository secured by OAuth 2.0, we can implement best practices such as:

• Integrating Salesforce deployments with an existing Git workflow of pull requests, code conflict checks, code review, and commits. This lets us scale deployments responsibly to multiple project teams, carefully track and control changes to master code, and eliminate the danger of team members unknowingly overwriting each other’s changes in cases of “code clobbering”
• Setting up a streamlined CI/CD pipeline, all the way from dev sandbox and UAT testing to master code merging and deployment to a production org. Since ClickDeploy is 100% cloud-based, we can set up and schedule these processes entirely in a browser, without the need for any server configurations, installations, scripting, or Jenkins
• Empowering admins of any technical skill level to advance changes through the DevOps workflow using clicks instead of code. Admins can initiate changes to source code and participate in CI/CD processes without having to work in Git, an integrated development environment, or even a command-line interface

3. Org Sharing Between Team Members Without Sharing Login Access

The nature of changesets requires admins and developers to work directly from within Salesforce orgs. First, an admin must log in to the source org to define an outbound Salesforce changeset. Then, the admin must log in to the target org to upload and deploy the inbound changeset. This process must be repeated for each pair of source and target orgs.

As project teams grow and deployments increase in scale and complexity, a given org could very well have multiple admins working within it at any given time, potentially leading to process conflicts and a generalized sense of chaos.

By orchestrating and monitoring all deployment activities from a single browser-based dashboard and establishing Git as the single source of truth for component code, ClickDeploy brings some much-needed order, clarity, and accountability to project workflows.

4. Deployment of Changes with Just One Click

Can you count all the hours you’ve spent waiting for Salesforce changesets to finish uploading to your orgs? These hours can add up to days or even weeks over the many iterative deployments of a complex project.

Think of how much valuable development time you would gain if you didn’t have to wait for the long uploads and other sluggish processes that come with changesets. Then consider how your Salesforce deployments can be accomplished 10 times faster in ClickDeploy vs changesets.

Once we select and validate our changed components using the intuitive ClickDeploy controls, it takes just one click of a button to deploy changes to the target org. Or, we can configure deployments that are automatically triggered by commit actions in our Git repository for automated CI/CD workflows. Thanks to ClickDeploy’s lightning-fast integration with Salesforce, deployments start immediately and finish in a matter of minutes with no time-consuming upload.

After deployment is complete, the Diff icons refresh to provide confirmation that the changes are now incorporated in our target org.

5. Seamless Cloning and Merging of Deployments Between Any Source and Target

ClickDeploy’s seamless integration with a version control repository means that we can confidently clone, branch, and merge deployment configurations across our Salesforce orgs and source code. To see how this works, let’s look at an example.

Janet the developer has built a new inventory tracking feature for her customer, TopShelf Attire. Thanks to an automated CI/CD workflow set up through ClickDeploy, the feature has already been deployed, tested, and validated on the UAT org. Now Janet is ready to commit and merge her feature branch code with her team’s master code on GitHub.

To start this process in ClickDeploy, Janet clones an earlier deployment that she used to set up UAT testing since it already contains the components she needs. For the new deployment, she configures her sandbox org as the source and her team’s Git master as the target. She clicks one button to commit her changes to a branch of the master, and then another button to review the changes directly in GitHub.

In GitHub, Janet creates a new pull request to initiate the code review of the feature branch by her team. Once the team approves the feature code, Chris the team lead merges the branch with the master. This Git master now contains the code for Janet’s feature along with the code for all the other new features that have been developed by team members and has already been merged with the master by Chris.

On the day of the scheduled release to TopShelf, Roger the release manager logs in to ClickDeploy and initiates a new deployment with the Git master as the source and the production org as the target. Once this final deployment is complete, TopShelf’s employees can log in to Salesforce and see the entire suite of new features that Janet’s team has created for them.

In addition, users can also merge component list easily within ClickDeploy by simply exporting the component list from one deployment and importing it to another deployment.

Get Started With ClickDeploy.io

Are you ready to explore how ClickDeploy can help you streamline your release processes to deliver faster and more frequent deployments to your customers? Use your Salesforce login to sign up for a three-week trial. ClickDeploy is secure and 100% cloud-based, so you can try it out for free without installing anything on your Salesforce org.

We recommend watching our informative video that explains how to set up a release management process with ClickDeploy and your Git repository. And if you have any questions or want to learn even more about how the ClickDeploy solution is better than changesets, we’re always here to help.