The Support Enterprise plan provides two help desk instances: a customer-facing production instance and a development instance known as the Standard sandbox. Use the sandbox to test, learn, and make mistakes before making your changes public. For example, you can use the sandbox to test and fine-tune new templates and branding without affecting your customers. You can create a new sandbox anytime you want. The Support Enterprise plan allows you to have a single sandbox at a time.
After you're done testing and deploying your changes, you can reset the sandbox for a fresh round of development.
You manage your sandbox in Admin Center. This topic describes how to use Admin Center to create and work with your sandbox.
This article contains the following topics:
How the sandbox works
The sandbox takes the following settings from your production instance of Zendesk Support. This matching ensures your starting point is as close to the current production instance as possible.
- Templates (standard emails, welcome emails, etc.)
- Branding (colors, account names, etc.)
- Settings (channels, agent permissions, etc.)
- Add-ons (excluding Answer Bot)
Any changes you make in the sandbox are not copied to your production instance. Once you're satisfied with the changes, you must reproduce them manually in the production instance. If you need to configure additional syncing from production to your sandbox, you can do so using our REST API.
You can start a trial in your sandbox for another Zendesk product, such as Chat or Talk. Any trial is subject to limitations and has a fixed time limit, as specified when you sign up for the trial.
The production instance owner is listed as the sandbox owner by default. This is true even if another admin creates or replaces the sandbox.
The sandbox does not replicate the following items:
- Help Center content and customizations
- Zendesk Talk data
- Zendesk Chat data and customizations
- Security settings (including SSO)
- API tokens
- Apps and integrations
- Conditional fields
- Twitter user identities
- Zendesk Support triggers, automations and custom fields
Sandbox replication does not include items like business rules, views, macros, groups, orgs, custom fields, users, user fields, and tickets.
Creating a sandbox
Before using your sandbox you must initialize it. The sandbox is created with settings from your current production instance of Zendesk Support.
To create a sandbox
- In any product, click the Zendesk Products icon (
) in the top bar, then select Admin Center.
- Click the Account icon (
) in the left sidebar, then click Sandbox.
- Click the Create Sandbox button.
- Enter a Name that describes your sandbox.
- Click Create.
You will see a message that your sandbox is being created. When your sandbox is successfully created, a message appears at the top of the page, and the status of the sandbox becomes Active. The sandbox has a unique URL with a ten-digit number after your domain name.

Working in your sandbox
Once you create your sandbox and it's active, you can start working in it. See Creating a sandbox above.
To switch to the sandbox from the production instance of Zendesk Support
- In any product, click the Zendesk Products icon (
) in the top bar, then select Admin Center.
- Click the Account icon (
) in the left sidebar, then click Sandbox.
- Click the options menu (
), then select Open Sandbox to launch the sandbox instance in a new browser tab. You can also bookmark the sandbox and access it from your browser.
- Sign in to the sandbox with your normal administrator credentials.
- Make changes, test, and fine-tune.
Replacing your sandbox
After you're done with a round of testing and updates, you can create a new sandbox for a fresh round of development and testing. Creating a new sandbox is also useful if you mess up and want to start from scratch.
The Support Enterprise plan allows you to have a single sandbox at a time. A typical procedure would be to delete the existing sandbox and create a new one based on the settings of your current production instance of Zendesk Support. See How the sandbox works.
To replace your Enterprise sandbox
- In any product, click the Zendesk Products icon (
) in the top bar, then select Admin Center.
- Click the Account icon (
) in the left sidebar, then click Sandbox.
- Click the options menu (
), then select Delete Sandbox.
- Create a new sandbox using the steps in Creating a sandbox.
A new sandbox is created with a new URL.
75 Comments
Hey Karen,
Have you made a lot of changes in your Sandbox account that resetting it would not be an option? I did some digging and it looks like resetting the Sandbox account can fix this issue, however, all customizations options made to your Sandbox account would be deleted.
Let me know if this isn't an option for you.
Thanks!
I just created our sandbox today. My hope was to have the Guide portion mimic what is in our production Help Center site. Instead, it comes in with a blank slate. Is there a way to reset it to mimic what it is in our production Help Center site?
Hi Sandy,
No, there is not. You would need to manually re-create everything in your Help Center in your Sandbox.
I think it is really crappy that I pay 10k a year and don't have a sandbox.
I have some major integration that I have written but have to test it at 3am in the morning so I don't disturb the users. Maybe if there were a way to test the site without publishing would be ok as well.
Hello Chuck,
So you should be able to use the preview mode to see changes made as an end-user, so you don't impact your users while you make changes on your end. I've gone ahead and linked an article that breaks down this process in further detail.
Previewing Guide as an end-user in the old theming experience
Best regards,
Devan
Hello Chuck,
We can sync your instance to a second Zendesk dev environment if you're running Zendesk Professional
https://premiumplus.io/sandbox-syncing
It only requires a second Zendesk environment with a single license and allows for testing without disturbing the live setup
Sandy Inserra, you could use the API to copy content from your production instance to your sandbox. But you'd need to have some programming skills to do it.
Hi. For some reason when i go to Manage>... I can't see the Sandbox option to create a sandbox.
Is there anything special I need to define in order to see it?
Are you running Zendesk Enterprise?
I am not sure ( need to check with the account owner), but it was my understanding that there's a basic sandbox available for all accounts (according to the article).
Did I get it wrong?
Yair Abelson, you must have at least the Enterprise plan in order to have the sandbox. This article is only relevant to the Enterprise plan.
Can you confirm that this change will not impact how our sandbox will works today. We have our test website accessing the Sandbox help center via SAML SSO. We have the Sandbox Chat widget embedded on the test website using visitor authentication. Our test website maintains users and organizations in Sandbox via the Rest APIs. Basically, our Sandbox is a complete copy of our production environment and the hope is nothing is impacted by this change, including accessing Sandbox via the backdoor verses SSO.
Hey Christopher,
If you already have access to your Sandbox then these changes shouldn't affect you. The only change to note is that you'll begin accessing your Sandbox link through the Admin Center instead. However, if you navigate directly to the URL then that shouldn't be an issue either.
Let me know if you have any other questions!
Is it possible to add more users to the sandbox environment than the number of admins in the production environment? I want to add a few test users to my sandbox environment. The issue is the kind of users who would be using the sandbox environment would be different.
Subhajit Ray The users you add to your Sandbox account do not have to match up with the users in your Production environment. You would need to just manually add them to your Sandbox account and set their role up as an administrator. They should then receive an email to set up their credentials.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
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