Gearset’s strengths

At the heart of Gearset’s technology is its metadata comparison engine, which can quickly identify net changes between a source and target set of metadata, whether that’s in source control or in a Salesforce org, in both directions. This allows Salesforce practitioners to quickly see what has changed and build that into a deployment or a set of changes to commit to source control in an easy-to-understand user interface. In the following screenshot, we can see a line-by-line comparison of XML metadata:

Figure 12.1 – Gearset’s comparison of XML metadata. The intent of this screenshot is to show the page layout; text readability is not essential.

By contrast, the next screenshot shows a richer user interface for managing picklist value metadata:

Figure 12.2 – Gearset’s comparison of picklist values, with a custom user interface instead of XML

A core aspect of Gearset...