topic Re: Hubpost Sandbox in CMS Development

How will you manage testing and development with sandboxes in HubSpot?

SKovacic — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:15:14 GMT

Hi everyone,

With the Legacy Standard Sandbox being sunset, I’m curious how others are planning to use HubSpot sandboxes in the future. Are you moving fully to the new Standard Sandbox, changing your development/testing workflow, or using other alternatives for staging and QA?

Also, would a new development account be a good option in this case, or do you see it more as something separate from a proper sandbox setup?

I’d love to hear how your team plans to handle development, testing, and deployment going forward.

Re: Hubpost Sandbox

Anton — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:59:23 GMT

Hey @SKovacic,

to be honest - I'm still not 100% sure if I like this change as I like to keep things seperated.

My (old style) setup:
got a few developer accounts which contain different types of test accounts.

For instance I got several Dev accounts where I'm creating dedicated Test accounts per client. When I'm developing something I'm pushing things to those accounts, invite the client to test and once everything is fine, I push the things to their live accounts.

With this new setup a few things that I'm not very happy about (and hopefully HS will reconsider it) are:

Naming conventions doesn't allow "pipes" in the naming. Therefore my whole portal list gets messy. My naming convention was like "GS | Client | Clientname". GS is GraphiSpot (my company) so I know/knew that it's a test portal created by me. Now I have to write GS-Client-Clientname. Small change but if you got XX portals, the sorting gets messed up. (unless I rename every portal)
Last week, I've accidentaly found out that these Test accounts got Seats now as well. I understand that this most likely done for several reasons like a bit more prevention in order to not allowing users to use test portals as technically free enterprise level live portals or specifically check if a seat is required but being forced to apply a Sales/Service seat to add several people as Super Admins is not great and can cause other types of confusion.

As I'm doing mostly CMS stuff, my plan is to keep this type of setup, so I have the control over the Test Accounts/Sandboxes (whatever you wanna call them).

best,

Anton

Re: Hubpost Sandbox

BérangèreL — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:12:08 GMT

Hi @Anton and thanks for sharing your valuable feedback, we really appreciate it!

I'd suggest sharing this via the Developer Feedback Form here. If you'd like, I am happy to submit on your behalf, just let me know.

Hi @SKovacic, to reply to your questions: Legacy Standard Sandboxes will sunset on March 16, 2026, making way for our upgraded Standard Sandbox.

The new version brings new features like a native Deploy to Production workflow, helpful conflict warnings, and detailed deployment logs.

Instead of resyncing, you can now simply recreate your sandbox whenever you want a fresh copy of production.

For your development and testing needs, here are some great options:

- Standard Sandbox (Enterprise): Perfect for testing workflows, integrations, and business logic in an environment that closely mirrors production. Plus, you can now deploy changes directly to production!

- Development Sandbox (Enterprise, via CLI): Lightweight and ideal for early-stage proofs of concept, especially project and UI extension work. You can recreate it often for a clean starting point.

- Developer Test Accounts: You get up to 10 free per account, each with a 90-day Enterprise trial. These are wonderful for isolated app and integration testing—complementing sandboxes, but separate from your main data.

- Configurable Test Accounts (via CLI): Easily simulate different Hub and tier combinations to thoroughly test your app.
It’s good to know that developer test accounts excel at app and integration testing, but since they're not tied to your production data, they offer a different kind of flexibility compared to sandboxes.

I hope this helps!
Bérangère

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