Across industries, Salesforce has become central to digital transformation strategies. As organizations scale, they quickly reach a familiar decision point: should we build an in-house DevOps solution to manage our Salesforce environments, or buy a purpose-built platform?
This decision impacts deployment speed, compliance readiness, and your ability to scale. `Making the wrong choice can cost millions in lost productivity and technical debt. Getting it right is a business imperative.
In this article, we’ll explore five critical factors that can guide your decision in 2025.
1. How soon can you expect value from a new DevOps solution?
Time to value is often underestimated. A custom DevOps build can take 6–24 months before it delivers stable results. That may be acceptable if you have a long runway, but for many organizations, waiting that long puts digital transformation programs at risk. If your executive team is looking for visible wins in the next quarter, building may not align with the timeline.
2. How complex would the infrastructure be?
Salesforce’s metadata-driven architecture differs fundamentally from traditional development. Custom solutions demand engineers who understand both DevOps and Salesforce’s metadata-driven architecture. Recruiting and retaining that expertise is increasingly difficult in today’s market. Additionally, custom solutions often struggle with profile migrations, merge conflicts, and Salesforce’s regular updates. Purpose-built solutions handle these changes natively, requiring less internal expertise and resulting in fewer infrastructure conflicts.
3. What is the true cost of ownership?
Licensing a platform comes with a clear price tag. Building looks cheaper at first, but the numbers rarely stay that way. Initial build costs may seem lower than platform licensing, but consider the full picture: 3–5 full-time engineers for ongoing maintenance, constant security patching across multiple tools, and compliance reporting that must be kept audit-ready. Our analysis shows that over five years, custom solutions often cost two to three times more than initially projected.
4. What’s the risk tolerance?
Every Salesforce release introduces potential break points. In-house DevOps means your team is responsible for ensuring every update, patch, and configuration is secure and compliant. For some organizations, that level of control is a strength. For others, it is a constant liability. Buying a platform shifts that burden to a vendor, but requires trust in their security standards and certifications.
5. Where should our strategic focus be?
The build or buy decision ultimately depends on how you align resources with business strategy. If your developers should focus on building DevOps infrastructure as a competitive differentiator, building it may justify the investment. If they should focus on customer-facing applications while prioritizing speed to market and predictability, buying a purpose-built solution typically delivers better results.
Moving from Analysis to Action
The build vs buy decision impacts every aspect of your Salesforce operations-from deployment frequency to developer satisfaction. Before committing to either path, consider these practical evaluation steps.
For the Build Path
Calculate your true capacity by multiplying the number of available engineers by their Salesforce expertise level. If you have fewer than 3 dedicated experts with deep platform knowledge, building becomes exponentially harder. Also assess your organization's tolerance for extended timelines as most companies underestimate build time by 2-3x.
For the Buy Path
Request specific deployment metrics from vendors: average implementation time for organizations of your size, rollback success rates, and number of customers in your industry. Verify their Salesforce-specific capabilities by asking how they handle profile migrations and merge conflicts, two areas where generic tools fail.
If regulatory compliance is mandatory, factor in the ongoing cost of maintaining audit trails, security patches, and documentation. This often tips the scale toward buying, unless compliance tooling is your core business.
Get the Complete Framework
These initial assessments only scratch the surface. Our comprehensive guide includes TCO calculators, vendor evaluation matrices, real-world case studies from Fortune 500 companies, and a decision framework that maps your specific requirements to the optimal approach. Download the full whitepaper [Salesforce DevOps: Build vs Buy] to access the full methodology and make your decision with confidence.
