When running a comparison between your source and target, the Gearset Default comparison filter includes the most common metadata types, including Custom objects, Profiles, Permission Sets, and Apex code.

Simply, choose your preferred filter and select Compare now.

If you want more control over which metadata is compared, you can select a different standard filter. Or you can create your own custom filter.

Custom filters let you define which types of metadata you want to retrieve, and exclude those you’re not interested in. They allow you to add in the less commonly compared metadata types that aren't included in the default setting, such as Reports, Static Resources, and Documents. Retrieving less metadata means your comparisons will run faster.

As well as choosing the metadata types to retrieve, such as Apex Classes, you can also specify the names of specific items to retrieve using a custom filter. This gives you greater granularity over what to compare.

For convenience, when you select a filter (standard or custom) and then run a comparison with that filter, our app will remember that filter and have it selected when you go to run a comparison again.

Custom filters can also be used for automation jobs, such as continuous integration (CI jobs), and org monitoring. Once you save a filter, it will be available across Gearset in any place that allows you to specify the metadata filter used.

If you edit the custom metadata filter used in a CI job, the job will not automatically use the updated filter.

To update the filter, you'll need to:

The CI job will now apply your updated filter for all future runs.

When you save a custom metadata filter, you can choose whether to share it with the rest of your team or if you want to make the filter private (available only to you).
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When a filter is shared with the team, only its original creator or a team owner can edit and save changes to it. Team members can use the filter but cannot make and save changes to it; they can use Save as to save any changes they make as a new named filter.

When creating a new custom filer, Before the Share with option becomes available (highlighted in grey), after you've selected all the metadata types you want to add to the filter, click on the drop-down arrow (highlighted in red), then Save as new filer, next type in your custom filter's name, and click Save as.

This will enable the Share with option and allow you to choose whether to make the filter private (by selecting Only me), or to make it available to your Team.

Custom filters (private and shared) will appear in your filter menu in the My filters section. You can find them below the all the Gearset standard filters:

In the above example, we've added a regex pattern ^Appointment.* to include all the named items that begin with the word "Appointment"

To delete a custom filter:

Gearset app comes with seven standard or default metadata filters:

The Default comparison filter contains the most commonly compared objects. For the majority of users, this filter will retrieve all the metadata items you are interested in comparing and deploying between your environments.

To compare all supported metadata types, choose the Compare all filter. This will also include any managed packages.

The Default CI comparison filter includes the most commonly deployed components when setting up a continuous integration job in Gearset.
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For detailed information about all our standard metadata filters, feel free to check this article: What is a metadata filter?

When creating a custom filter to speed up comparisons, it can be useful to know which metadata types contain the largest number of items to retrieve, so that you know which types to consider excluding. 

Once you select the source and target on the Compare and deploy screen, Gearset will begin querying Salesforce for the number of metadata items to retrieve in the comparison.

Once this query completes (usually 5-10 seconds) Gearset will display the total number of metadata items.

After the query is complete, opening the Manage custom filters... dialogue will display the number of items to be retrieved in each metadata type.

For example, below you can see that there are 262 Custom objects that will be retrieved using the current filter. Using a custom filter would allow you to specify a smaller number of Custom objects if you wanted to (or if you don't need to retrieve all Custom objects found in your environment).

(Please Note: For Custom objects you can also specify sub-components, such as Custom Field or Record Type, to be retrieved along with their parent metadata which in this case is Custom object).

When creating a custom filter, it's important to understand the way the Salesforce metadata API works. Many objects have interlinked dependencies, and to retrieve all the metadata you're interested in, you will need to include all the relevant metadata types.

For Profiles, for example, see this support article on which metadata types you need to include in your filter to retrieve particular subcomponents:
​How to retrieve Profiles and their components using Gearset's metadata filter

If you're not familiar with which metadata types you need to include in your filter, we recommend you stick with either the Default comparison or Compare all filters.

For more information, read the Salesforce documentation on the metadata API.