Salesforce Editions & Sandboxes

Any company implementing Salesforce for the first time or getting migrated to Salesforce CRM should choose the type of Salesforce edition based on their type of business. A set of Salesforce features wrapped together is what we call Editions.

Salesforce provides 7 types of editions namely

• Personal Edition

• Contact Manager

• Group Edition

• Professional Edition

• Enterprise Edition

• Unlimited Edition

• Developer Edition.

An overview of the different types of org within Salesforce

Like any other technology/Platform, Salesforce also ensures to keep live data separated strongly from development or the testing org. In order to keep live data separate, salesforce provides different orgs, for a different purpose. There are two broad categories of org:

1. Production instances
2. Development instances

Production instances- Production org is used for live-user.  You can not write the code directly in Production, It should go from Sandbox to production.

Development instances-Development instances are used for building and testing new features and customizations before they are released into the production instance. There are several types of development instances, each serving different purposes and with different sets of features and customizations available. There are the following Sandboxes:

1. Full copy sandbox-This is a complete copy of a production org including data and customization (metadata). It is mostly used for pre-release testing by end-users.
2. Partial copy sandbox-This copies the customization, and a sample of a production organization's data (up to 5GB). It is mostly used for integration and user acceptance testing by the development teams.
3. Developer pro org-This copies customization but not production data. Developer pro orgs can store a small amount of data that is generally used for testing purposes. These orgs are where new features will be built and tested by Salesforce developers and admins.
4. Developer edition org-A developer edition environment is a free environment with less storage than a developer pro org. Users can sign up for as many as they need. Developer edition orgs start out as "blank" templates and are often used as initial development environments for small pieces of work alongside developer pro orgs.
5. Scratch org-The scratch org was recently introduced by Salesforce as a way of modernizing the development process on the platform. Scratch orgs are short-lived, disposable, and source-driven environments used for quick testing and development. They can be created on the fly via a command-line tool and are automatically deleted after a short time. They will typically be loaded with a very limited subset of customization and data during specific phases of testing, and then be deleted.