Salesforce Sandboxes 101: Everything about Pricing, Types & Features

What Is Sandbox?

Salesforce Sandbox is a copy of your production organization. You can create multiple copies of your organization in separate environments for different purposes such as development, testing, and training, without compromising the data and applications in your production organization.

Salesforce sandboxes are completely isolated from your Salesforce production organization, so operations you perform in your sandboxes do not affect your Salesforce production organization and vice versa.

Generally, each phase of the project requires different environments. During the construction phase, there are chances to multiple teams will work on development in this case each team requires its own sandboxes for development. After the construction period, we need one common testing environment, during the training period training team requires a separate environment for training purposes, and before going to production one STAGING environment is required. So for each phase different environments are required.

• The Salesforce Sandbox is a copy of your organization in a separate environment—it’s like copying and pasting your organization onto another page so you can keep your original work.
• A sandbox contains all the configuration, customization, apps, and code (known as metadata) that you have made to your Production environment (where users log in and work every day).

So, a sandbox creates both a developing and testing environment within Salesforce.

Salesforce sandbox types

There are four different types of sandboxes with different features :

Full Copy Sandbox

• Full copy sandboxes are an exact copy of production including standard and custom object records, attachments, and documents. You can refresh the full copy sandbox every 29 days.
• it provides data storage equivalent to your production organization.

Partial Copy Sandbox

• Partial Data sandboxes can include your organization’s standard and custom object records, documents, and attachments with up to 5 GB of data and a maximum of 10,000 records per selected object.
• A Partial Data sandbox is smaller than a Full sandbox and has a shorter refresh interval. You can refresh a Partial Data sandbox every 5 days.

Developer Sandbox

• The developer sandbox is a copy of production, it copies all application and configuration information to the sandbox. This type of sandboxes is limited to 200MB of test or sample data, which is enough for many developments and testing tasks.
• You can refresh a developer sandbox once per day.

 Developer Pro Sandbox

• Developer Pro sandboxes copy all of your production organization’s reports, dashboards, price books, products, apps, and customizations under Setup, but exclude all of your organization’s standard and custom object records, documents, and attachments. This type of sandboxes is limited to 1GB of test or sample data.
• We can refresh developer pro-type sandboxes once per day.

Salesforce Sandbox Pricing:

The pricing of the salesforce sandbox is not fixed. It depends on your current contract with Salesforce.

Developer Sandbox: It's free. It is an Individual dev environment with a copy of all your metadata

Developer Pro Sandbox: It costs 5% of net spend.

Partial Copy Sandbox: It costs 20% of net spend.

Full Copy Sandbox: It costs 30% of net spend.

New Updates in Salesforce Winter '23 Release

Quick Clone in Sandboxes

The Quick Clone feature allows teams to quickly create replicas of Developer and Developer Pro sandboxes, thereby reducing idle developer time, enabling parallel working, and building more efficient continuous integration jobs.

Quick Clone can create new copies of your "template sandbox", so you can spend less time setting up Sandboxes and more time developing features.

This feature will be available in Hyperforce.

Identify Which Sandboxes Get a Preview of the Next Salesforce Release

Currently, You are not able to see new features in non-preview sandboxes until they are generally available.

But after this update, you can check which sandboxes get upgraded early (preview), and which sandboxes are scheduled to be upgraded with production orgs (non-preview) during major Salesforce releases.

We will be able to see these enhancements in October 2022.

Why should I test in Salesforce Sandbox?

The benefits of testing through the salesforce sandbox are as follows:

• With Salesforce, you can use the sandbox for testing, development, and research without the worry of losing data in your production organization.
• You can plan and schedule the upcoming releases in Salesforce according to your requirements.
• After the updates come, you have the option to test it properly before letting it change your production organization. This further gives a sense of data security too.

Salesforce Sandbox Template

A sandbox template enables you to choose specific objects and data to copy into your sandbox. You can create a sandbox template that defines the object data you want in your sandbox. When you create or refresh a  Partial or Full sandbox that time you will have the option to use your sandbox template.

Salesforce updates the template by adding or subtracting the related, included objects. For example, if Object A is a master of Object B, and you add Object B to a template then Salesforce requires Object A in the template and adds Object A.

Note that sandbox templates are only available with Full and Partial Copy Sandboxes.

How To Create Sandbox Template?

Go to setup, Search Sandbox and open

Click on Sandbox Templates and select New Sandbox Template

Select the Object that you wants to copy in Sandbox

Sandbox Template get Created

How To Create a Salesforce Sandbox?

Salesforce Sandbox Url and How To Login In?

Search "test.Salesforce.com" on the browser, enter the production's username & password, Add(.SandboxName) in the production's username, and log in to Sandbox

After Login You can see a grey line with Sandbox's name on the top

Conclusion

In conclusion, Salesforce Sandbox is a copy of a production organization that can be used for development, testing, and training without compromising the data and applications in the production organization.

It is completely isolated from the production organization and offers different types of sandboxes with varying features and data storage limits.

The pricing for Salesforce Sandbox depends on the current contract with Salesforce, with the developer sandbox being free and the full copy sandbox costing 30% of net spend.

The latest Winter '23 Release includes a new Quick Clone feature for Developer and Developer Pro sandboxes that aims to reduce idle developer time, enable parallel working, and build more efficient continuous integration jobs. This feature will be available in Hyperforce.

Additionally, it is also possible to identify which sandboxes will get a preview of the next Salesforce release.

Helpful Links

• Official document about Salesforce Sandbox