Rollup Helper vs Declarative Lookup Roll-up Summaries (DLRS)

Last updated 8/23/2023

There are significant limitations with the roll-up summary fields provided out of the box in Salesforce. If you are curious to learn more about the limitations, check out the resource links at the bottom of the blog.

We will cover two options for you to get more functionality than what Salesforce offers out-of-the-box as it relates to roll-ups using clicks not code, and help you to make the best informed choice of the options available.

First, before we get started with our two contenders, there is a lot of talk online about using Process Builder (PB) with Flow to execute a roll-up process. While this can work and is a very innovative use case for these awesome admin tools, due to the inability to run a process builder on a delete, this is not a solution that will yield accurate results and requires coding to complete. Also, Salesforce will be retiring Workflow Rules and Process Builder and enhancing Flow starting in 2022. As such, we are not covering Process Builder and/or Flow as viable solution in this blog.

Second, there are some third party roll-up apps that we did not include in our analysis as they effectively just install hard-coded roll-ups in your org on specific standard Salesforce objects or are relatively unpopular apps. This blog will only cover roll-up solutions that are expected to perform roll-ups based on any end-user configuration thrown at them.

Lastly, you can of course write custom Apex Code to perform a roll-up. Before new apps were released on the AppExchange, this was a popular way of meeting any roll-up requirement. Since we are looking for solutions without coding, and other blogs have already been written about how to write custom Apex to run a roll-up, we are not covering those solutions.

With that being said, the two main apps available to extend the Salesforce roll-up capability are Rollup Helper by Passage Technology and Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries (DLRS) by Andrew Fawcett. Both apps can do roll-ups and have been around for a while, but we’ve tested them to give you the nitty gritty about them so that you can make an informed decision.

Note: Information Accurate as of 8/23/2023

• *A page-load roll-up is a type of rollup triggered to run once needed when the Salesforce platform doesn’t permit any real-time roll-ups to otherwise happen.

Ultimately, both apps will help you to get way more value from Salesforce, but as the developer of Rollup Helper, we here at Passage Technology want you know that our app has been installed and battle tested in over 50,000 Salesforce customer orgs, we have very few open issues, and we completely support our product installations. Our solution truly requires no coding and we are ready to support your every use case and technical platform challenge no matter if you are a beginner admin or Salesforce architect. We have all the needed advanced rollup features and reliability/usability features in an enterprise app. Plus, we have 2-3 releases per year just like Salesforce and are always producing new features for our roll-up engine while also providing timely enhancements and utilizations of the latest features the platform has to offer.

Don't just take our word for it!

"Before signing up for this app, we looked at the free Declarative Lookup Rollup Summaries app, but decided to go with this paid app instead. The reasons are:
- It provides a good administrative interface, so that you do not need to understand code to use this product
- It can handle more use cases, for example, when the filter on the rollup must look at other objects
- As a paid product you get the benefit of customer support and possible consultation/help.
Now that we installed and started working with it, we see that this app has very rich functionality, enabling us to implement several fairly complex use cases. For example, you can create a rollup to update a field based on filter criteria in a third object. There is a rich choice on various scheduled and/or immediate rollup updates.
I also appreciate the free 1-hour consultation session to discuss our specific situation and use cases, and the fact that the developer even volunteered to implement a trigger to facilitate our use case." - Lev Mirlas in a Rollup Helper AppExchange review

Background Resources

• Salesforce limitations with Roll-up Summary Fields are documented in the roll-up summary field knowledge article.
• Eliminate Need for Master-Detail Relationship for Roll-ups (55,000+ points, 11+ years old!)
• Take the Implement Roll-up Summary Fields trailhead to learn about what’s offered out of the box with Salesforce.

We hope you have found this comparison helpful. If you have any comments, questions, or further differences you’d like to point out, please comment below!