Smarter Sandboxes for Safer Deployments!

[Denise_Thijzen]

We’ve launched Public Beta for HubSpot’s New Standard Sandboxes and a powerful new feature: Deploy to Production. These updates are designed to help customer with enterprise-level subscriptions experiment and innovate with confidence, without putting their live environment at risk.

Why Sandboxes Matter

One of the biggest challenges teams face is figuring out how to build and test new business processes without disrupting end users in production. Making changes directly in production can introduce errors, create rework, and cause data issues.

With sandboxes you get:

• A safe environment that mimics the features and supported assets of your live account where you can build and validate new processes risk-free.
• And now, with Deploy to Production, a seamless way to deploy supported assets into your live portal when ready.

Deploy to Production: Safe and Seamless Rollouts

With the new Deploy to Production you no longer need to manually rebuild sandbox changes in production.

Instead, the deploy feature will automatically:

• detect new assets eligible for deployment (i.e. lists, forms, marketing emails, object configurations, and workflows),
• identify any of their required connected assets,
• check for conflict so that deployments are smooth and predictable,
• give you a way to track deployments for change tracking and troubleshooting.

Take a look at the deploy wizard!

Deploy to Production: Supported assets

Example: connected assets required as part of a user selected asset

Example: conflict detection step

Deploy name and description step

Review changes prior to final deployment step

Key Personas Deploy to Production

Whether you’re launching a big lead nurture campaign or optimizing your CRM through powerful automations, you can now do it smarter, safer, and faster.

While Sandboxes can be leveraged for various use cases, we've matured the product with new technology to support key personas directly involved in building, testing, and deploying supported assets to production.

Whether you’re in Marketing Ops, Sales Ops, Business Ops, or a Systems Architect, each role gains the ability to test and deploy confidently.

Sandboxes with Deploy to Production create value across the business.

See it in action → Watch our demo

 

A new way of thinking 

Many of you may have been used to using the resync feature to refresh sandboxes. While convenient, resync introduced major risks:

• It could wipe out in-progress work, disrupting active development.

• It undermined environment lifecycle management, making it harder to ensure development always started on a production-like copy.

• It made change tracking between environments nearly impossible, threatening the reliability of Deploy to Production.

To ensure sandboxes mature into a tool you can trust for safe deployment, we’ve removed the resync feature. The best practice will be to delete and recreate sandboxes when needed. This ensures you always start fresh, avoids drift across environments, helping you maintain a predictable and reliable development flow. 

Rethinking Sandbox Governance

With these changes, it’s important to be intentional about how you use sandboxes. Here’s a simple framework to guide you:

Framework Sandbox Governance

Intentional governance keeps sandboxes clean, reliable, and deployment-ready:

• Deployments are safer and smarter, with automatic dependency handling and conflict checks.
• Sandboxes are more reliable, because they’re recreated intentionally, not unpredictably resynced.
• Teams gain structure and clarity, through governance practices that define purpose, access, lifecycle, and deployment processes. 

Final Thoughts

With Standard Sandboxes, Deploy to Production, and a new focus on governance, we’re helping you deliver changes in HubSpot the way they should be: simple, safe, and strategic.

These updates are big shifts, and we know they represent a change in how you’ve used sandboxes in the past. That’s why we’re sharing this early: to give you the reasoning, the best practices, and the confidence you need to adopt them successfully.

We’d love to hear your thoughts:

- How are you planning to define your sandbox strategy?

- What governance practices will help your team get the most out of Deploy to Production?

- What types of deployments are you most excited to try with Sandboxes? 

Join us for our async [AMA] Ask Us Anything about Deploy to Production with Sandboxes | August 25 - August 29 Leave us your questions and our team will be delighted to answer them during the event. 

[louischausse]

Nice beta.

Would love to be able to sync updated assets not just new assets.

Thanks.

[Denise_Thijzen]

Hi @louischausse - in our effort to mature the technology the first deploy to production feature will focus on deploying new assets from Sandbox to Production. 

Updated assets is a longer term consideration considering the higher risk for breaking change in live production accounts. 

One way you could navigate this constraint is to work with clones of your existing assets and using naming conventions to track versions. This would allow you to then plan your cut-over period from the 1st version of your asset to your new version. 

[SSamani]

HI there, we are looking to test this functionality, and have followed the instructions to create a new Standard Sandbox from Production. We selected to bring over all configuration, but no data. However when we look in our new Sandbox, we have the following discrepencies with our Production environment:

- Custom objects and properties for standard objects have come over, but the Groupings of properties are all over the shop. The Groupings have come over, but properties are not aligned the same was as production at all

- Conditional Logic for both custom and standard objects have not been copied over

- Changes to the "Create Object Form" have not been copied over

- Changes to the Default Card and Default View have not been copied over.

I've been looking for documentation of what is supposed to be included in the copying to the new Standard Sandbox and what is not. Is this expected behaviour, or should I be raising bugs for the beta?

[Denise_Thijzen]

Hey @SSamani - I'll send you a DM to gather more context.

For clarity, the following two points are not supported currently, which is why you're not seeing them:

- Changes to the "Create Object Form" have not been copied over

- Changes to the Default Card and Default View have not been copied over.

During the sandbox creation flow, you can collapse the "See which supported assets will be copied" to review what is supported:

Additionally, you can also review the knowledge base article for assets eligible to be deployed. This article details what is supported vs what needs to be manually reconfigured after you've made a deployment.  

[connorshaw]

Looks good, I've just enrolled in the beta and am using it. Can I ask what happens over time to the existing Legacy and Standard sandboxes once this features goes from beta to production? Just want to avoid developing anything in Legacy if that sunsets, or the new standard one if it's iterated on