Salesforce Free Trial and Developer Org Sign Up Links

When a new or prospective customer wants to try out Salesforce, they can choose an industry-specific template that comes with sample data. These are called “trial orgs” because they’re intended to be converted into a paying account before the end of the trial period.

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What is a Salesforce trial org?

A trial org includes sample data and various Salesforce features and is easy to convert into a paid subscription org.

Trial orgs are not just for customers

Consultants, administrators and developers commonly use trial orgs to test functionality within a fresh, specific data model.

For example, if I am taking on a FSC (Financial Services Cloud) project and I want to test a new way of automating something that’s impacted by the unique FSC data model, I wouldn’t want to use a developer org because dev orgs have no test data included in them and it would take me too long to load data for testing.

However, I also know that that the trial org I spun up will not last forever – I consider it a short-term, disposable org. Anything of value I build in it I will rebuild in a dev org for longevity.

How long is the trial period?

The trial period differs based on the industry template selected, and is almost always extended at no cost by the Salesforce AE if the sales cycle is taking longer than the trial period.

For example, the FSC (Financial Services Cloud) trial is 30 days, compared to the CQP (Configure Price Quote) trial which is 90 days.

Explain the difference between a trial org and a dev org

The difference between a trial org and a dev (short for developer) org is that a dev org cannot be “converted” into a paying account. Dev orgs are meant to be used as a testing environment and cannot be transitioned to a paid Salesforce environment.

A few other differences include:

	Trial Org	Dev Org
Data Storage	10GB, until it becomes a paid account and additional licenses are assigned	5MB
Expiration	Based on template (i.e. 30 days, 90 days, etc.)	12 months
Support	Yes	No
API	No	Yes, access to Lightning Platform and APIs
Licenses	Depends on the industry-specific trial org	2 max

*The average size of a Salesforce record is 2KB, which means a dev org can store about 500 total records.

How is a trial org converted to a paid subscription?

*I say “converted” but what I mean is that additional licenses are assigned to the trial org and data and file storage is expanded to their normal limits. The actual org that is in play remains the same.

It’s less common (at least in the small/mid space) to see a Salesforce customer start out by building into a trial org and then start over in a new org.

Wait… what’s a Trailhead Playground?

Yep, but they serve a different purpose than trial and dev orgs. Trailhead playgrounds are intended to facilitate the completion of training (Trailhead) modules.

Some Trailhead modules require you to use a specific Trailhead Playground that has been provided for that specific module, as it has a specific feature enabled or it has been pre-configured for testing in a way that a dev org hasn’t.

Consultants, administrators and developers commonly use trial orgs to test functionality within a fresh, specific data model. For example, if I am taking on a FSC (Financial Services Cloud) project and I want to test a new way of automating something that’s impacted by the unique FSC data model, I wouldn’t want to use a developer org because dev orgs have no test data included in them and it would take me too long to load data for testing.

Here’s a list of Salesforce trial org sign up links.