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SF-0245 · Concept · Easy

What is an org in salesforce?

✓ Verified by Vikas Singhal · Last reviewed 5/17/2026 · Updated for Spring '26

An org (short for organisation) is a single Salesforce environment — a self-contained, isolated copy of the platform with its own URL, its own users, its own data, its own metadata, and its own customisations.

Every Salesforce account you’ve ever logged into is an org. acme.my.salesforce.com is one org. acme--uat.sandbox.my.salesforce.com is another. They share the same vendor (Salesforce) but they’re separate environments — different data, different code, potentially different schema.

What’s inside an org

  • An Org ID — 18 characters, unique across all of Salesforce globally.
  • A primary URL (the my.salesforce.com domain plus your subdomain, since My Domain became mandatory).
  • Users, profiles, permission sets, roles.
  • Standard and custom objects with their records.
  • Apex code, flows, LWCs, validation rules — all the configurable behaviour.
  • Reports, dashboards, list views.
  • Storage — data storage and file storage, billed against the edition’s quota.
  • API limits, email limits, governor limits — all scoped to the org.

Multi-tenancy in one sentence

Many orgs share the same underlying Salesforce infrastructure (servers, databases). The platform isolates each org by Org ID so tenant A never sees tenant B’s data — even though they’re physically on the same servers. This is the entire reason Apex has governor limits.

Org categories

Salesforce orgs fall into two broad buckets:

  • Production orgs — the real, live instance customers and end users use every day. Companies typically have one.
  • Sandbox orgs — non-production copies attached to a production org. Used for development, testing, training. Multiple per production, types include Developer, Developer Pro, Partial Copy, Full Sandbox.
  • Developer Edition / Trailhead Playgrounds — free, standalone production orgs for learning and personal projects.
  • Scratch orgs — short-lived, source-driven orgs spun up via Salesforce CLI for individual developer work.
  • Trial / Demo orgs — temporary orgs Salesforce provisions for prospects.

What an org is not

  • Not an instance in the data-centre sense. An instance (like NA45, EU17) is a physical pod of servers that hosts hundreds of orgs.
  • Not a user account. A user belongs to an org; an org has many users.
  • Not a tenant boundary across products. Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Core have separate orgs; integration is required to share data.

Why this matters in deployments

Every Salesforce deployment is between orgs — typically from a sandbox org to its production org. The whole concept of “deploy this to that” presupposes the org as the unit of work.

Quick check: how many orgs do you have?

In a sandbox-attached production setup, the count is usually:

  • 1 × production
  • 2–5 × sandboxes (mix of Developer, Developer Pro, Partial, Full)
  • 0+ × Developer Edition for individual learning
  • 0+ × scratch orgs spun up daily by developers

All count as separate orgs even though they “belong to” one Salesforce contract.

Verified against: Salesforce Help — Organization Information, Metadata API Developer Guide. Last reviewed 2026-05-17 for Spring ‘26 release.