Gearset lets you compare any two Salesforce organizations or source control repositories and see the configuration differences between them. If you're new to Gearset, running a metadata comparison is a great place to start. 

To run a comparison, you'll first need to connect your Salesforce orgs and/or source control repos.

You can do this in the My connections section in the left-hand side menu:

Alternatively, you can add Salesforce org connections directly on the Compare metadata page.

Find out more:

Log in to Gearset and go to the Compare metadata page, under Metadata deployments in the left-hand side menu.

Under Choose comparison source location, click Salesforce organization.

Enter the username for the org you want to connect to.

If the connection is one you’ve already added via the org connections page, you'll see a green tick next to the username. That connection will now be saved for easy re-use in future comparisons.

Or, click Add new connection.

Repeat for your deployment target location.

Once you've selected a source and target, the COMPARE NOW button will become enabled.

Custom filters let you define which types of metadata you want to retrieve, and exclude those you’re not interested in.

The Gearset Default comparison filter includes the most common metadata types, including Custom Objects, Profiles, Permission Sets, and Apex code. For ease, you can select this.

Or, learn more about custom metadata filters.

Click COMPARE NOW to begin your comparison.

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Gearset will now login to your source and target, download and retrieve the metadata from those environments (in accordance to your metadata filter), and compare the differences.
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Note that depending on the size of your orgs, this can take a few minutes. More on this can be found here.

Once you've run your comparison, you'll be able to see what changes have been made, when and by whom at a glance, without the need for manual XML diff or change tracking documents.

Read our guide on exploring comparison results.

Learn more about configuring comparisons (including selecting version control branches as source or target in the comparison, or local files as source).