Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Growth or higher, Support Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
There are three kinds, and the one most plans include copies nothing at all. Pick the type before you make it, because that choice decides whether the sandbox is worth anything to you.
Create it
- In Admin Center, click Account in the sidebar, then select Sandbox > Sandboxes.
- Click Create Sandbox.
- Enter a Name that says unmistakably which environment this is.
- Choose the type. You can only pick types your plan includes or that you have purchased.
- Wait for it to build, then sign in and check what arrived.
Three types, and what each copies
| Type | What it contains |
| Standard | None of your settings, none of your business rules, none of your tickets. An empty Zendesk. |
| Premium, metadata | A copy of your production settings and business rules. No tickets. |
| Premium, partial or full production | Settings, business rules and tickets, with the end users, agents and organisations attached to them. You choose how much ticket data comes across: 0, 500, 5,000 or 10,000 tickets. |
Support Enterprise includes one sandbox. Suite Enterprise and Suite Enterprise Plus include two. Zendesk does not publish which types those are, so confirm with us what your account has before you plan around it. Below that, from Support Professional and Suite Growth, sandboxes can be purchased.
Email addresses are already neutralised
User addresses are invalidated with the @example.com domain before they reach the sandbox, precisely so that test mail cannot reach your customers. That is done for you, and it is the reason a sandbox is safe to experiment in.
It is also why an address in the sandbox never matches the one in production, which surprises people testing anything that looks a customer up by email.
What never comes across
Personal views, macros, legacy agents, custom object records and action flows are not replicated, and only the first 100 comments of each ticket are. Closed tickets do not come across at all, and of the rest only those updated in the last six months. SMS is not supported in a sandbox at all. In Zendesk Suite a sandbox covers Support functionality: Talk and Guide are not included, with two exceptions set out in the article on syncing products.
So a test that depends on a long ticket history, on a personal macro, or on any of those channels will behave differently there. Check what arrived rather than assuming, before you build a plan on it.
Refresh before serious work
A sandbox stops matching production the moment either one changes. Testing in a stale sandbox produces confidence that does not transfer, which is worse than no test at all.
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