While working in Salesforce, we need to deal with data almost every day. Loading or extracting data is an important pre-requisite for almost all production deployment/Go-Live activity. Do you know the there are many different data loaders available today? This post will cover some of the most popular data loaders with their advantages and disadvantages.

Data Import Wizard

This is built by Salesforce and available in all editions. It has a very easy step by step user interface which makes it very popular among the Salesforce developer/admins. You can load many standard objects including Accounts & Contacts, Leads, Campaign Members, Person accounts. You can load custom objects too with this one.
Advantages: 
  • User friendly.
Disadvantages: 
  • Can load a maximum of 50,000 records at a time. In a real-world scenario, this can be a problem as the number of records can be in the range of millions.

Salesforce Data Loader

Another data loader solution created by Salesforce. This application you need to install in your machine. As a pre-requisite, you need Java installed in your machine. It comes with some advantages settings which makes this app a perfect solution for handling pretty much any scenarios.
Advantages:
  • You can load 5,000,000 records. Much higher compared to Data Import Wizard.
  • Quicker, powerful application.
Disadvantages:
  • Need to install in your machine. It is not a cloud application.

Dataloader.io

It is a 100% cloud-based data loader application that you can access through your browser. It was developed by Mulesoft,  but with the Salesforce’s Mulesoft acquisition, this tool now became a member of the Salesforce family. This application can everything that Salesforce Data Loader can do and then on top of that comes with some great advanced features.

Advantages
  • Cloud bases simple, but advanced user experience.
  • You can schedule tasks
  • It can find parent records based on text, not an ID.
  • After import, you can download the result, which will bring the Salesforce IDs for the newly created records.
Disadvantages
  • Not found anything yet.

SimpleImport

This is a free DataLoader solution which is available in AppExchange. It allows you to import Excel spreadsheets into any object. It comes with automated field mapping functionality. It has a rating of 4.9 with 36 reviews in AppExchange.
Advantages:
  • Easy to install from AppExchange.
  • User Friendly.
Disadvantages:
  • I faced some problems while loading picklist values with this app. The good part is that it gives you an error message, which will help you to solve the mapping/configuration.

XL-Connector (formerly Enabler4Excel)

This is an Excel plugin that enables you to perform all sorts of DML operations very quickly. Like Dataloader.io, this is something that you need to install in your machine and it is not a cloud solution. It made life so easy when dealing with migrating data between systems and doing VLOOKUPs in Excel.
Advantages
  • You can get data from Salesforce right in your Excel.
  • Fetch report data right in your Excel.
  • Performs DML operations on small to medium size datasets.
  • “Analyze Layouts” helps you to analyze metadata and page layouts in your org.
  • “Field Utilization” provides the usage reports of the fields.
Disadvantages
  • Not all features are free. You need to pay $10 per month, but with this small price, the power you will get is tremendous. Once you first register, you will get 30 days of the trial period to explore the product.

Please let me know if you are using any other data loader. I am very much interested to know other products as well as your feedback while using those products.