Salesforce is a powerhouse underpinning everything from the data cloud to the Customer 360. 

Unfortunately, managing Salesforce DevOps comes with its challenges: 

• Change Sets - the default Salesforce DevOps service - are inefficient, without version control, laborious to configure, and often leave out many critical component development features (e.g. standard picklist values).
• The Salesforce DevOps Center is a promising upcoming contender but is still missing features to cover basic DevOps needs.

Luckily, platforms like Copado and Opsera can streamline your Salesforce DevOps processes, so you don’t end up stuck with custom scripting.

Follow along to compare Copado vs Opsera on 6 crucial points:

1. Development environment coverage
2. Integrations with third-party software applications
3. Ease of use, setup, and administration
4. Pricing model
5. Scalability
6. Insights

Copado vs Opsera: Salesforce DevOps Overview

Both Copado and Opsera are no-code/low-code continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms that offer many features to streamline and automate Salesforce DevOps.

By streamlining Salesforce DevOps, companies:

• Save time with faster, more reliable deployments.
• Increase release cadence with automation (continuous integration / continuous deployment), which also leads to a tighter feedback loop.
• Deploy fewer bugs/errors to production thanks to testing.
• Improve collaboration between developers and admins, partly because of the audit trail showing who changed what, when, and why (version control).
• Improve security due to monitoring and backup.

There are crucial differences between Copado and Opsera in how they achieve the above Salesforce DevOps benefits for their users.

Take a look at the short comparison before we dive deeper into each point:

Comparison #1: Development environment

Copado is a low-code Salesforce DevOps and testing cloud platform built on top of Salesforce. It is designed for Salesforce’s first-party platforms and is unable to manage DevOps and release management for other software applications or cloud environments.

On the other hand, Opsera scales DevOps and deployment management processes for any development environment such as SAP, Snowflake, Apigee, Boomi, Informatics, AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. 

This stark contrast means you can use Opsera as a one-stop shop for all your CI/CD. Its feature-rich offerings - beyond Salesforce DevOps - empower you with automated monitoring and KPIs (get to business insights faster), quality gates building, and all the CI/CD orchestration capabilities needed to automate DevOps with no-code solutions.

Comparison #2: Integrations with third-party software applications

Both Copado and Opsera offer many integrations with third-party software applications that help you streamline various aspects of Salesforce DevOps, such as:

1. Version control solutions - GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket.
2. Continuous Integration (CI) services including Jenkins, TeamCity, and Bamboo.
3. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools like Jira.
4. Testing suites like Selenium and Apex.

Opsera covers a much wider area of integrations to best-in-class software applications with 80+ integrations (and growing), compared to Copado’s 20+ integrations.

Crucially, Copado does not integrate with: 

1. Popular cloud solutions like Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Terraform.
2. Analytic services used for monitoring like Grafana, Tableau, and Kafka.
3. Log management tools like Kibana and the Elastic Stack.
4. Collaboration tools like PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, or Atlassian Confluence.
5. Configuration automation solutions like Ansible, Puppet, and Chef.
6. Containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.

Opsera’s wider range of integrations allows you to build with the best tool for the job and shape Salesforce DevOps according to your developers’ needs. You developers and IT experts can save time, conquer Salesforce DevOps processes faster, and release more confidently using the tools they already know.

Comparison #3: Ease of use, setup, and administration

Both Copado and Opsera are comparatively similar in their ease of use - it is superb! The platforms are designed as low-code and no-code solutions, helping you cut through the boilerplate code and focus on building DevOps processes that push the needle.

There are differences in setup difficulties: customers often complain that Copado is not intuitive from the get-go. For example, Copado's branching strategy is a common issue, even among satisfied customers, due to its non-intuitiveness. Luckily, Copado offers ample on-demand training resources, so you can help get your engineers up to speed before they start using the solution.

Contrast this with Opsera’s G2 reviews: “When assessing the two solutions, reviewers found Opsera easier to use, set up, and administer. Reviewers also preferred doing business with Opsera overall.”

Most importantly, the two platforms differ drastically when it comes to administration.

In Copado, you are responsible for maintaining, updating, and running APIs and webhooks that integrate with DevOps tools.

On the other hand, there is no need to write custom scripts in Opsera. Opsera’s out-of-the-box integrations are managed by the platform, no need for your software team to spend time debugging integrations. Additionally, this Salesforce DevOps tool offers many automation features that make administration and management easier, such as standing up instances and scaling them when the pipeline is executed and shutting down the containers when not in use. This architecture also means that while the pipeline is being executed your changeset never leaves your tenant, providing an additional layer of security.

Comparison #4: Pricing model

With Copado, you are required to pay for users, which implies that even infrequent users such as Product Managers who log in only once a month are incurring expenses for your team.

When using Opsera, you pay for the pipelines directly instead of paying for individual users. This not only helps reduce costs but also facilitates faster adoption of the tool by enabling easy access to the necessary tools and reporting for everyone on the team, without the concern of seats or expenses.

Wondering how the platforms perform in practice?

Unfortunately, Copado doesn’t offer a free trial. You’ll have to get your credit card ready or check out the “Copado Essentials” product, a very feature-poor version of Copado CI/CD that gives you 15 deployments per month, but no team collaboration or version control abilities. 

Instead, have a look at Opsera’s Salesforce DevOps free trial. You can connect your Salesforce org and GitHub/GitLab accounts to automate the end-to-end release in under 30 mins. Without even swiping the credit card.

Comparison #5: Scalability

Copado is a native Salesforce solution, which runs on top of your Salesforce org. This could potentially lead to a situation where synchronizing changes between your different development, testing, and quality assurance environments could cause a slowdown in production or vice versa. The more components and tools you run in each environment, the more resources you eat away from production.

Opsera is designed as an independent platform that operates separately from your Salesforce organization, using a microservices architecture that scales as the pipeline runs. Consequently, it achieves genuine continuous integration without impeding individual productivity, irrespective of the number of environments or developers involved.

Opsera is here to grow and scale with you.

Comparison #6: DevOps Insights

Both Opsera and Copado generate metrics to provide insights into your Salesforce DevOps.

Alas, Copado is limited to DORA metrics, such as deployment frequency, lead time, average change fail rate, and average recovery time.

Contrast this to Opsera’s Unified Insights:

• 150+ out-of-the-box KPIs, computed automatically from event logs as you use the platform.
• Covers metrics and KPIs across your entire DevOps stack.
• Pre-made and fully customizable dashboards for executive views, managers, and developers.
• Drill downs by project, person, team, and other dimensions of interest.

Get end-to-end visibility of your software delivery. 

Opsera provides management-ready insights across all of your teams’ continuous integration and continuous deployment workflows, security, and operations with over 150 KPIs included out-of-the-box. 

But Opsera goes beyond empowering your management. It also helps you build and deliver products.

Copado vs Opsera: Final verdict

Both Copado and Opsera are great contenders for the title of Best Salesforce DevOps platform.

But Opsera takes the lead in this comparison. This CI/CD automation platform:

1. Supports not just Salesforce, but all the big development platforms.
2. Integrates with a greater share of the DevOps ecosystem of tools.
3. Is easier to use, set up, and administer.
4. Has a pricing model that is better suited for team collaboration.
5. Offers a free trial so you try the Salesforce DevOps product without vendor lock-in.
6. Scales with your organization.
7. Offers the best-in-class out-of-the-box insights machine with 150+ automatically computed KPIs across your entire DevOps stack.

Curious about what you can build with Opsera? Schedule a demo with our experts.