The Scratch Org vs Sandbox debate reflects a deeper question about how your team approaches Salesforce development — as a configuration management challenge or as a software engineering discipline. The answer shapes your entire DevOps strategy.
When Sandboxes are the right choice
Sandboxes are the right choice for environments that need production data, shared team testing environments, and UAT with real users.
Full Sandbox is the only environment that faithfully replicates production data volumes and configuration. Use it for performance testing, load testing, and final UAT with business stakeholders who need realistic data.
Partial Copy Sandbox provides all production metadata plus a configurable sample of data. It is the right balance for integration testing and QA when full data volumes are not needed but realistic data is.
Developer Sandbox and Developer Pro Sandbox provide metadata-only copies of production. They are appropriate for sharing across a small number of developers when Scratch Org adoption is not feasible.
When Scratch Orgs are the right choice
Scratch Orgs are the right choice for isolated feature development and CI/CD.
Every developer should work in their own Scratch Org during feature development. This eliminates the sandbox conflict problem — two developers cannot accidentally overwrite each other’s work because they are in completely separate environments.
In CI/CD, Scratch Orgs provide the clean-slate repeatability that makes automated tests reliable. Every pipeline run starts from the same baseline.
Summer ‘26: Salesforce Web Console
Summer ‘26 introduced the Salesforce Web Console — a browser-based IDE available in all org types including Developer and free orgs. It replaces the Developer Console (which has received minimal investment for years) and the Workbench tool (which has been officially unsupported).
The Web Console provides Apex execution, SOQL query, metadata browsing and component development without local installation. For developers who spend time in Scratch Orgs, this reduces the need to switch between the browser and VS Code for quick investigations.
The recommended environment strategy
For a mid-to-large Salesforce team in 2026:
Individual Developer Work └── Scratch Org per feature branch ↓ PR merged CI Pipeline └── Fresh Scratch Org per pipeline run Apex tests, static analysis, deployment validation ↓ Tests pass Integration Sandbox (Developer Sandbox) └── Combined changes from multiple developers Smoke testing, integration validation ↓ Validated UAT Sandbox (Partial or Full Copy) └── Business stakeholder testing Real data, realistic scenarios ↓ UAT sign-off Production
Source control as the source of truth
In a well-structured Salesforce DevOps pipeline, Git is the single source of truth for all configuration. No configuration change is made directly in a sandbox that is not reflected in Git. Changes made in Setup UI in a Scratch Org are retrieved and committed. Changes in sandboxes are tracked through source tracking where available.
This discipline ensures that any environment can be recreated from source at any time — the definition of infrastructure as code applied to the Salesforce platform.
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