Pocavi vs OwnBackup: Do You Need Full Data Backup or Metadata Rollback?

The backup question every admin asks

At some point, every Salesforce admin has that moment. Someone deletes a flow. A deployment overwrites a validation rule. A picklist value disappears and nobody knows who changed it. You open Setup, stare at the audit trail, and wonder: can I get that back?

OwnBackup (now branded as Own Company) has been the default answer to that question for years. They back up your entire Salesforce org: data, metadata, files, attachments. Full snapshots with point-in-time recovery. It's a mature product with a strong reputation, and for good reason.

Pocavi takes a deliberately different approach. We back up metadata only. No record data. No attachments. And that choice is intentional.

What each platform backs up

OwnBackup captures everything. Every record in every object. Every file and attachment. Every piece of metadata. Full data backup with incremental snapshots, typically running daily. If someone deletes 10,000 Accounts, OwnBackup can restore them. If a data migration goes wrong and corrupts a million records, OwnBackup can roll back to yesterday's snapshot.

Pocavi captures metadata only. Custom objects, fields, validation rules, flows, Apex classes, triggers, page layouts, profiles, permission sets, custom labels, reports, dashboards. The configuration and code that defines how your org works. If a deployment breaks something, you see exactly what changed (visual diff) and roll it back with one click.

The trade-off is clear. OwnBackup protects against data loss. Pocavi protects against configuration loss. In practice, most Salesforce incidents that admins deal with are configuration problems, not data problems. A bad flow deployment. An overwritten validation rule. A deleted custom field. These are the fires that metadata backup puts out.

We chose metadata-only deliberately. Backing up record data means storing potentially millions of rows of customer data, which creates liability, requires strict data residency controls, and adds significant cost. Metadata backup covers roughly 90% of the rollback scenarios admins actually face, without the compliance overhead of storing customer data.

Pricing: standalone vs bundled

OwnBackup is a standalone backup product. Pricing varies, but enterprise contracts typically start at $10,000 per year and scale with the number of orgs, data volume, and retention period. For large orgs with multiple sandboxes, $20,000 to $40,000 per year is common.

Pocavi includes metadata backup in every plan. The Starter tier ($299/month) includes weekly backups with 7-day retention. Business ($699/month) includes daily backups with 30-day retention. Platform ($1,499/month) includes daily backups with 1-year retention. Backup isn't an add-on or a separate line item. It's part of the platform.

That bundling matters because backup is rarely the only tool a Salesforce team needs. If you're paying $15,000 a year for OwnBackup, you probably also need deployment tools, org health monitoring, and maybe GDPR compliance. Each of those is another vendor, another contract. With Pocavi, those are all included.

What else you get with Pocavi beyond backup

When you compare Pocavi to OwnBackup purely on backup features, OwnBackup wins. Full data recovery is a bigger safety net than metadata-only recovery. That's not a close call.

But backup is one of seven modules in Pocavi. The same $699/month Business plan that includes daily metadata backup also includes:

• Smart deployments between orgs with change detection and dry-run validation
• 19-category org health scanning with deep analysis and remediation guidance
• Field impact analysis showing where fields are used across flows, reports, and page layouts
• Permissions matrix with profile and permission set comparison
• AI-powered data loader with field mapping
• SOQL query tool with autocomplete and saved queries
• Monitoring with live Salesforce Trust Status integration

Add the DevOps add-on ($499/month) and you get release management, visual pipelines, DORA metrics, and code analysis. Add GDPR ($349/month) and you get subject access requests and anonymisation. Add Forecasting ($399/month) and you get AI deal scoring, pipeline views, and waterfall reports.

The comparison isn't really Pocavi vs OwnBackup. It's one platform vs five separate vendors.

When each makes sense

Choose OwnBackup if you need full data backup and recovery. If your compliance requirements mandate point-in-time data restoration, or if you've had incidents where record data was lost or corrupted, OwnBackup is the right tool. It's purpose-built for that problem and does it well. Some teams run both: OwnBackup for data, Pocavi for everything else.

Choose Pocavi if metadata rollback covers your backup needs and you want to consolidate the rest of your Salesforce tool stack. If your incidents are mostly "someone broke a flow" or "a deployment went wrong" rather than "we lost 50,000 records," metadata backup is enough. And you get six other modules included in the price.

For teams that are honest about what their actual backup needs are, metadata-only backup with a full ops platform often makes more sense than paying for a standalone data backup tool they rarely use for data recovery.