Do you develop on the Salesforce Platform? We want to hear from you! The 2025 State of Salesforce Development Survey is here, giving you the opportunity to directly impact the tools and resources available to the Salesforce Developer community. In this blog, we’ll let you know how you can participate in this year’s survey and share highlights from last year’s survey, showing how your feedback has shaped our direction.
What is the State of Salesforce Development Survey?
The State of Salesforce Development Survey is conducted every year to understand the evolving landscape of the development experience on the Salesforce Platform and all Salesforce products. Respondents come from diverse backgrounds and experiences, representing the vast Salesforce Developer community. The survey dives into various aspects, ranging from challenges with Salesforce development to the emerging trends shaping the Salesforce ecosystem. Some survey questions are repeated every year to track trends over time, and we also replace some questions to keep up with the changes in Salesforce and the industry more broadly.
Let your voice be heard in 2025!
At Salesforce Research & Insights, we deliver insights to help our product teams drive exceptional customer and product experiences, built inclusively and ethically, across the entire Salesforce Customer 360 portfolio. Getting feedback and learning directly from those who use our features and tools are important to improving our products and setting priorities.
We understand that Salesforce development is continually evolving, which is why we want to hear from you each year. The industry moves quickly, and learnings from last year may not be entirely applicable to this year.
Why should you participate?
- Help us shape the future of Salesforce development, as your feedback will help our teams figure out how best to make your development experience better
- As a thank you for your time, the first 1,000 respondents with valid survey completions will receive a $10 USD (or equivalent) gift card
This 30-question survey should take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete and is open to anyone who develops in the Salesforce ecosystem, regardless of job title. Take the survey now!
Don’t wait — the survey closes on April 30, 2025, and it may close early if we reach the maximum number of respondents. Thank you for your time and feedback!
2024 State of Salesforce Development Survey results
The annual survey continues to show us the multifaceted nature of the Salesforce development ecosystem. The 2024 findings mirror some trends that we shared from the 2023 survey. We also gained new insights that informed product improvements to our development and AI tools.
Ecosystem remains diverse, consistent in 2024
While developers remain the most represented group, we found a diverse community of other roles developing on Salesforce, like admins and architects. A significant portion of respondents reported wearing multiple hats, blending development with admin, architectural, and analytical responsibilities.
Furthermore, the data continues to show us that use of no/low-code and pro-code tools is not an “either/or” scenario for many respondents, which is consistent with previous surveys. Although a handful of respondents exclusively use one type or the other, the majority leverage both tool types to best suit their specific tasks. This reinforces our belief that Salesforce development tools should cater to a range of preferences, empowering everyone to choose the solutions that best enable their success.
Addressing debugging challenges & unifying the developer experience
From the 2024 survey results, two of the many takeaways we learned about current tools in Salesforce development: the difficulty of debugging and the desire for more unified tooling.
The most challenging Salesforce development task selected in 2024 was debugging and troubleshooting issues in development. Among a list of tasks across the development lifecycle, debugging was rated as both the most difficult and selected as the most frequent task. We’ve since released LWC Local Dev, which allows you to easily get a fully working local preview and can help you troubleshoot issues more quickly. To help you test, debug, and monitor at scale, we’ve continued to improve our suite of scalability tooling, including Scale Test, Scale Center, and ApexGuru.
We’ve also made more improvements to tools that help you shift left, so you can test and identify issues earlier in the development process, including continued improvements to Code Analyzer and working on DevOps Testing as a part of the roadmap.
We also received feedback expressing a desire to simplify and unify our tools, so we’ve been working to bring more of our tools together. For example, we’ve launched Data Cloud in sandbox environments and Agentforce on Developer Edition orgs. This provides the core platform experience of experimenting, innovating, and building with confidence in a pre-production environment that includes Data Cloud and Agentforce. We also released the DX Inspector, a new management tool within sandboxes that enhances metadata tracking and visualization in an org. This provides a unified view of all modifications across the org and provides a hierarchical view of your metadata.
AI for development use cases & democratization
In 2024, a significant portion of respondents had integrated AI development tools into their workflows, including tools such as Agentforce for Developers. Over two-thirds of respondents reported using AI, with the four most common use cases being Apex code generation, test case generation, code documentation/explanation, and LWC code generation. This helped inform feature prioritization for our product roadmap, and now Salesforce AI tools like Agentforce for Developers support all top four use cases.
We also learned that no/low-code respondents didn’t use AI development tools as much. We now have tools like Prompt Builder and Agent Builder, designed to democratize AI development and make it accessible to everyone, regardless of coding expertise. We’re actively continuing to make improvements, ensuring that the power of AI can be leveraged across the entire Salesforce development spectrum, empowering all users to build even more intelligent and efficient solutions.
Take the 2025 survey!
We highly value your input and would like to hear from you in the 2025 survey. As a thank you for your time, the first 1,000 respondents with valid survey completions will receive a $10 USD (or equivalent) gift card.
This year’s survey will close on April 30, 2025, or earlier if we reach the maximum number of respondents.
About the author
Nathan Khuu is a Senior Researcher on the Salesforce Research & Insights team.