Have you been in a situation where you need to easily import data from a spreadsheet to create or update records in Salesforce? Or have you ever found yourself repeatedly and laboriously updating your data record by record, wishing you could just mass update all your data as you would on excel? Data loaders for Salesforce are here to help make your life a little less tedious ; they enable you to easily import and export data to and from Salesforce.
You shouldn’t have to rely on a technical team to keep your data updated but it shouldn’t take you hours of editing it manually either. The following 5 data loader applications for Salesforce all come with their own pros and cons. To help you choose which one is right for you and your team, I’ve outlined them based on their simplicity of use for non-technical teams, overall speed, automation and scheduling power, amount of records that can be imported or exported, and one-off data loads.
Dataloader.io: for teams looking to just export and import data into Salesforce with no additional tools
Dataloader.io may be the most recognizable name on this list for data loaders. It has a simple set-up process, a straightforward user interface, and allows for scheduling actions.
You can however only import and export up to 100,000 records based on which plan you choose. It’s VLOOKUP and export filter helps you to efficiently sort and edit your data before exporting. You do have to export data completely out of dataloader.io and then re-import it; there is no interface to transform or edit your data within dataloader.io. This is time-consuming to export, manipulate and then re-import, but overall Dataloader.io has a great review of its interface and abilities. According to reviews on dataloader.io, it often can take a few hours to export all the attachments and you may need to export everything in chunks.
Dataloader.io’s pleasant user interface
Jitterbit: for teams willing to learn the interface who have complex data operations
Jitterbit integrates with more than just Salesforce and has lots of powerful features for extracting, transforming and loading data. Jitterbit will definitely have what you need to import, export, mass edit, manipulate, and push your data to other platforms with an unlimited amount of records, but it is really not the most user-friendly or intuitive. It also is not meant for one-off loads as it is known to be slow.
Jitterbit’s Data Loader may look a little overwhelming, but it is still very powerful
Actiondesk: for teams looking for a fast and most powerful data loader
Actiondesk is a slightly different option, as it is a spreadsheet software natively integrated with your data sources and business apps. Meaning no more CSV copy pasting. You can import data from SQL, Stripe, Salesforce, Hubspot and more.
Disclaimer: author of this post works at Actiondesk.
Salesforce Data Loader: for large amounts of records, one-off imports or exports
Salesforce Data Loader (formally called Salesforce Apex Data Loader) is best known for its speed of importing and exporting up to 5 million records. For a one-off import and export of a large number of records, this would be your best choice. It has a relatively easy to use interface but is not completely intuitive. It doesn’t come with advanced tools for mass editing or transforming.
Salesforce data loader’s simple interface matches how easy it is to use and fast to export.
Data Import Wizard: for simple import jobs
Data Import Wizard’s greatest feature is its easy deduping ability. You can always be sure with Import Wizard that there are no duplicates incoming from your spreadsheet. This is great for repetitive simple imports and is internal to Salesforce, so the set-up process is extremely easy. However, Import Wizard only allows for an import of 50,000 records and has no export capabilities.
Data Import Wizard has a simple interface to easily import data
I would love to hear from you! If you’ve tried one of those tools and have feedback, please let me know. If there’s one tool you think should be in this benchmark, let me know as well!
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