Demo Sandbox: What It Is, When to Use It & Software Pricing (2025)

You're demoing your product using a shared "demo account" in production, and it's getting messy. Reps step on each other's test data. Someone accidentally deleted the example workflow everyone uses. And last week, a prospect saw another customer's company name during a screen share.

If any of this sounds familiar, you might be considering an isolated demo sandbox for your product. However, software runs anywhere from from $500/month to $10,000+/year. How do you know what's right for your team or whether you need one at all?

This guide helps you answer both questions: when sandboxes make sense versus just demoing from your production environment, how to choose between tools if you do need one, and the actual pricing that most vendors hide behind a sales call.

Why Trust This Guide

I'm Umberto, cofounder of HowdyGo - a demo sandbox platform included in this guide. So yes, I have a horse in this race.

That said, we've taken an approach to this guide to try and make it uniquely useful for the awkward middle - GTM teams of 10-200 people who've outgrown founder-led demos but can't justify $5k/month enterprise platforms. That means pricing transparency, honest guidance on when NOT to use sandboxes, and practical advice for teams that need to scale without breaking the budget.

Umberto Anderle

Cofounder @ HowdyGo

- Umberto

What is a demo sandbox?

A demo sandbox is a standalone, isolated replica of your product that functions exactly like your live application but operates completely independently from your production systems and real customer data. These environments are often easily personalizable to individual prospects with realistic sample data and preconfigured workflows.

Here's a demo sandbox of Salesforce that you can launch to get a better sense of what they are:

How to create a sandbox demo

Step 1: Map Your Happy Path

Before capturing anything, identify the exact flow you want to demo. This isn't about narrative or storytelling yet - it's about knowing which screens you need to effectively demo of the product.

Walk through your product and write down:

• Your starting point (usually a dashboard or home screen)
• Each screen you'll visit during a typical demo
• The clicks that get you from one screen to the next
• Any secondary screens you regularly pivot to when prospects ask questions

You can do this by simply watching your best rep run a couple of demos and note where they actually go. Don't to capture everything. A sandbox that covers 30 screens is harder to maintain and navigate than one that nails the 10-12 screens you actually use.

Note: You can always add more screens later on or link between different sandboxes to keep each individual one more manageable.

Step 2: Capture Your Flow

With your happy path mapped, open the HowdyGo Chrome extension and click through your flow. That's it - just navigate your product the way you would during a demo while the extension captures each screen.

You don't need perfect demo data loaded before you capture. One of the advantages of HTML capture is that you can edit text, names, numbers, charts and other content after recording. Capture the structure first; polish the data later.

Step 3: Add Navigation Links

When you capture, HowdyGo automatically links buttons and anchor tags to corresponding screens. But you might want additional links to jump around.

During a call, conversations go sideways. A prospect asks about reporting when you planned to show it later - or asks about something you weren't planning to cover. You need to get there fast.

Add links that let you:

• Jump directly to key features from your main dashboard
• Skip ahead in your flow when a prospect wants to see something specific
• Navigate back to earlier screens without clicking through the whole sequence

The difference between a polished demo and a clunky one is often just navigation. When a prospect says "can you show me the reporting?" you should be there in one click, not hunting through menus.

Step 4: Edit Your Demo Data

Now that your flow is captured and navigable, make the data compelling. Generic content ("Test Company," "User 1," "Project ABC") kills credibility - prospects mentally check out when they see placeholder content.

Use HowdyGo's HTML editing to:

• Replace company names with realistic-sounding examples (not your actual customers)
• Update numbers, dates, and metrics to tell a convincing story
• Add content that supports the points you make during demos
• Create examples for common questions ("here's what it looks like when X happens")

Step 5: Test It Like a Real Demo

Before using your sandbox with prospects, run through it as if you're on an actual sales call:

• Share your screen and talk through the demo out loud
• Time yourself - does it fit your typical call structure?
• Have a colleague play the prospect and throw questions at you mid-demo
• Test the navigation: can you smoothly jump to different sections when asked?
• Share it with someone else on your team so that they can test it themselves and give you a second opinion.

Step 6: Build Variants for Different Conversations

One sandbox rarely fits all conversations. Once your core demo works, consider creating variants:

• By persona: Emphasizing reporting for executives vs. daily workflows for end users
• By use case: Different data or flows for different problems you solve
• By deal stage: A shorter version for first calls, deeper version for technical evaluation

You don't need multiple variants on day one. Start with one solid demo, use it for a few weeks, then build variants based on which conversations need different emphasis.

Step 7: Keep It Fresh

Your product ships new features. Your sandbox needs to keep up - but not immediately. Update when:

• A feature you demo regularly gets a meaningful UI change
• You release something significant enough that prospects ask about it
• Your demo data starts looking dated

With HTML capture, updates take minutes: recapture the changed sections and republish.

The demo sandbox maturity model

Most teams don't jump straight to purpose-built sandbox demo software. They evolve through a predictable progression of increasingly sophisticated (and increasingly painful) approaches to sales demo environments.

Eventually, they realize they're spending too much time maintaining demo infrastructure instead of selling.

Level 1: Shared production account

The team creates one "demo company" account in production with pre-filled fake data everyone uses. This eliminates the risk of demoing with real customer data, but creates new problems fast. Reps make changes during demos that affect the next person's call. The account fills with test data clutter. Nobody owns cleanup, so it drifts further from a good demo experience each week.

Typical pain: Reps stepping on each other's changes, discovering mid-demo that someone deleted the example they needed, spending 15 minutes before important calls cleaning up the shared account.

Level 2: Individual production accounts

Each sales rep maintains their own demo account in production. This eliminates conflicts between reps, but now you have 5-20 accounts to keep updated with every product release. Some reps diligently refresh their demo data; others demo features that shipped six months ago. The demo quality variance between your best and worst rep becomes painfully obvious.

Typical pain: Demo accounts constantly falling out of sync with the product, new reps taking days to set up proper demo data, no way to ensure consistent messaging across the team.

Level 3: Dedicated app instance for demos

Your engineering team builds a separate environment specifically for demos - a staging server with scripted data seeding and isolated from production. This is more controlled than individual accounts, but maintaining it becomes a low-priority burden. The demo environment lags behind production releases, data seed scripts break, and engineers resent spending time on "not real work."

Typical pain: Demo environment falling behind production by weeks, engineering treating it as low-priority, frequent breakage requiring engineering intervention, hacky workarounds for steps that only work in production (think demoing third-party integrations).

Level 4: Per-prospect environments

For high-value enterprise deals, engineering spins up custom demo environments with data personalized for specific prospects. This offers maximum personalization but requires significant engineering investment per opportunity. Only viable when ACV justifies having engineers involved in individual deals.

Typical pain: Engineering becomes a sales bottleneck, high opportunity cost of technical resources on demo infrastructure, doesn't scale beyond enterprise deals.

The hidden cost of "building it yourself"

"Why don't we just spin up a demo instance?" is one of the first things you'll consider when you need a more flexible demo environment. It sounds reasonable - until you calculate the actual cost.

Spinning up a server is the easy part. The real work is everything that comes after: data seeding, user accounts, realistic example content, documentation for reps, testing and maintenance.

Realistically, you're looking at $12,000-24,000 in year one - plus an ongoing engineering burden that never goes away.

Beyond the hours, the real issue is then what doesn't get built because engineers are maintaining demo infrastructure. For a 5-person engineering team, 200 hours per year is 4% of total capacity spent on something that doesn't ship features or reduce technical debt.

HTML demo sandbox tools change this calculation entirely. There's no environment to maintain - when your product changes, you recapture the new state in minutes. You're trading ongoing engineering time for a software subscription, and for most teams, that trade isn't close.

Sandbox demos vs interactive demos

The boundaries between these sales demo software tools can be quite blurry (especially since most demo platforms offer both) but understanding the core differences can help you choose the right tool for each stage of your sales funnel.

Both interactive demos and sandbox demos create clickable product experiences, but they differ fundamentally in how much freedom they give users:

• Interactive demos follow a guided path. Think of them as a curated tour - you can branch off at certain decision points, but the overall experience is linear. The demo shows specific features in a specific order, often with annotations, voiceovers, or tooltips that guide users through the story you want to tell.
• Sandbox demos offer free exploration. Users can click anywhere, navigate to any section, and explore features in whatever order makes sense to them. The experience mirrors how your actual product works, with minimal guardrails beyond optional hints or hotspots.

This fundamental difference shapes where each approach works best:

• Interactive demos excel at guided, asynchronous education. You send the link, prospects go through it on their own time, and the built-in guidance (text overlays, videos, voiceovers) walks them through the key features. They work particularly well on marketing sites where you need to create a clear "aha moment" in 2-3 minutes.
• Sandbox demos excel at deeper evaluation and live selling. Sales reps use them during calls to demonstrate real workflows, or send them as leave-behinds so champions can explore freely and share internally. The lack of heavy guidance makes them feel more like the actual product, which builds confidence in what prospects will actually get.

Most successful B2B SaaS companies layer these approaches:

• Interactive demos on the homepage and in paid ads to create quick "aha moments"
• Sandbox demos as leave-behinds after demo calls for champion enablement
• Interactive demos for specific feature launches or use case storytelling
• Sandbox demos for live sales calls where reps need a stable, personalizable environment

The key is matching the approach to where prospects are in their journey and how much guidance versus freedom they need at that stage. Many modern demo platforms (including HowdyGo) let you create both types from the same captured content, so you don't need to choose just one.

Benefits of demo sandbox environments

Demo sandbox environments aim to solve the operational pains that come from using live environments for sales demos. Here's what actually improves when you implement them:

1. Instant access without account setup. Every new prospect demo typically means setting up a new account, populating it with sample data, and configuring it to show features properly. That's 30-60 minutes of prep for a 30-minute call. With sandbox demos, your team gets a library of ready-to-go demos accessible through a single internal portal. No account provisioning, no data setup, no configuration.
2. Sample data you actually control. Managing realistic demo data across multiple live accounts is tedious. Data gets stale, reps make changes that affect other demos, and you end up showing prospects accounts cluttered with "Test Project 4" and placeholder text. Sandbox tools let you capture your demo environment once, edit it with ideal sample data, then reuse it across every prospect interaction. Need different data sets for different industries? Create variants that each stay exactly how you configure them.
3. Consistent demo quality across the team. Your best AE delivers a polished, compelling demo while your newest BDR shows the product in a half-configured state with confusing example data. Same product, completely different impression. When every rep uses the same polished sandbox demo, your worst demo is as good as your best demo. New hires ramp faster because they're using proven demos instead of building their own environment from scratch.
4. Point-and-click personalization. Personalizing a live demo environment means manually editing database records before each call, hoping you don't forget to change something back, and praying the prospect doesn't see "Demo Company" in a corner you missed. Sandbox demos let you change company names, swap logos, and edit text to reference specific use cases with a click.
5. Product updates without the pain. Engineering ships a new release, and suddenly your carefully configured demo account looks wrong - the feature you planned to show moved, the data doesn't display the same way, and you discover this five minutes before your biggest call of the quarter. With HTML capture tools, you you get version control so you can choose when you want your demos to be updated to the latest version.
6. Leave-behinds that keep working after the call. After a discovery call, you can share demo sandboxes with prospects simply by sending them a link. They can revisit what you showed them, dig deeper into features they didn't ask about, and share it with colleagues who weren't on the call. This is how deals move forward without you: your champion needs buy-in from their VP, they forward the sandbox link, the VP explores for 15 minutes, and the deal advances without you scheduling another demo.
7. Bridging the gap during onboarding. For products with lengthy account setup (enterprise software, complex integrations, anything requiring IT involvement) new customers can explore a pre-configured "best practices" sandbox while their real account is being provisioned. They see how the product should look when properly set up, start learning workflows before they have access, and hit the ground running once their environment is ready.

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When NOT to use a sandbox demo

Sandbox demos aren't the right approach if:

1. Demoing from your live product already works fine. If your product is simple enough that reps can demo directly from production without extensive prep, data cleanup, or risk of showing the wrong thing, you don't need a sandbox. Some products are naturally easy to demo - minimal configuration, clean default states, no sensitive data concerns.
2. Buyers need to test against their actual live environment. HTML capture replicates your UI, not your backend. When evaluation requires running real queries against their data, testing API integrations with their stack, or verifying performance characteristics, prospects need hands-on access to a live instance.
3. You're sharing demos without any context. Sandboxes assume prospects already understand enough to explore meaningfully. If you're embedding demos on your homepage, including them in cold outreach, or sending them before any conversation, unguided exploration tends to overwhelm rather than convert. In such cases, interactive product demos with built-in guidance, tooltips, and a clear linear story work better.
4. Your demo flow is inherently linear. If your product demonstration naturally follows a single path - step 1 leads to step 2 leads to step 3 - without meaningful branches or exploration opportunities, you're paying for freedom nobody uses. Interactive demo tools handle linear flows well and cost significantly less.
5. Your differentiator is implementation expertise, not the software. If you're selling consulting-wrapped software where success depends more on your services team than the tool itself, a polished demo doesn't address the real buying question ("can this team execute for us?"). The sandbox showcases the wrong thing.
6. You're still at founder-demo volume. If you're doing 5-10 demos per month and the founder/early team handles them all, the operational pains sandboxes solve probably aren't big enough yet to warrant automation. Invest when those problems start to really be felt.

Demo sandbox software compared

HowdyGo - Best for small-to-mid market teams who need to get live fast

Best for: Small to mid-market B2B SaaS companies who've outgrown demoing in production but don't need enterprise complexity (or the eye-watering price that comes with it). Particularly strong if multiple teams (sales, marketing, CS) need access and you don't want per-seat pricing eating into your budget as you grow.

Standout feature: Unlimited users at a fixed price. Your demo costs stay flat whether you have 5 reps or 50.

Downside: Fewer enterprise features than Navattic or Walnut - no advanced ABM integrations or heavy per-prospect customization workflows.

Pricing: $399/month for unlimited users. No sales call required. 14-day free trial available.

Navattic - Best for teams running account-based marketing campaigns

Best for: Marketing and sales teams running ABM programs who need demo engagement data tied to target accounts. Strong choice if you're already using ABM platforms like 6sense or Demandbase and want demo activity flowing into your account scoring.

Standout feature: Deep ABM platform integrations that sync demo engagement with account intent data, helping you identify which buying committee members are actually engaging.

Downside: Per-seat pricing adds up quickly for growing teams. The ABM-focused features that justify the premium aren't useful if you're not running sophisticated account-based programs.

Pricing: Starts around $500/month for small teams, with ABM features pushing closer to $1,000/month. Annual contracts typical.

Compare Navattic vs HowdyGo.

Walnut - Best for enterprise teams sending personalized demos to prospects

Best for: Enterprise sales teams who send customized demo environments directly to prospects for self-serve evaluation. Walnut's strength is 1:1 demo personalization for specific deals, not marketing-scale distribution.

Standout feature: Per-prospect customization that lets you tailor demo data, branding, and flows for individual deals without involving engineering.

Downside: Built for sending, not presenting. If your primary use case is live demos during sales calls, you're paying for capabilities you won't use. Also requires a sales call to get pricing.

Pricing: Starts around $1,550/mo.

Compare Walnut vs HowdyGo.

Storylane - Best for teams that also need to demo a mobile app

Best for: Companies with both web and mobile products who need a single platform to demo. Storylane's screenshot capture approach handles mobile apps that HTML capture tools can't replicate.

Standout feature: Mobile app demo support through screenshot capture. If you're demoing an iOS or Android app alongside your web product, this matters.

Downside: Screenshot-based mobile demos feel less interactive than HTML-captured web demos. The two formats don't feel seamlessly integrated.

Pricing: Their sandbox product is only available on their Enterprise plan which requires a call to get a custom quote. Reportedly, pricing will take you over >$2000/mo.

Compare Storylane vs HowdyGo.

Reprise - Best for large enterprises with dedicated presales teams

Best for: Mature enterprise sales organizations with dedicated sales engineering teams who need maximum flexibility and have the resources to manage a more complex tool. Strong choice if you need advanced security compliance and white-label capabilities for partner ecosystems.

Standout feature: Enterprise-grade security and compliance certifications. If your prospects require SOC 2 Type II documentation and detailed security questionnaires, Reprise is built for that conversation.

Downside: Complexity requires dedicated resources. This isn't a tool your AEs will pick up in an afternoon - expect a real implementation process and ongoing administration.

Pricing: Starts around $38,000/year for smaller companies. Custom enterprise pricing based on requirements.

Compare Reprise vs HowdyGo.

Demostack - Best for enterprise teams wanting multi-format flexibility

Best for: Demostack has it all. If you need to deliver different demo formats depending on the situation - cloned sandbox environments for deep technical evaluations, guided tours for quick overviews, and live overlays for presentations you can do it with Demostack's suite of products.

Standout feature: Multi-format delivery from a single platform. Switch between cloned sandboxes, product tours, and overlay demos without managing separate tools.

Downside: The flexibility comes with complexity and cost. For 99% of people, you're paying for capabilities you won't use and a learning curve that might put getting any ROI at risk.

Pricing: Starts around $50,000/year for access to only one of their products. Pricing requires a sales conversation.

Compare Demostack vs HowdyGo.

TestBox - Best for teams demoing in live production just needing data masking

Best for: Sales teams with stable, reliable production environments who want to demo the real product - not a captured copy - while controlling the data prospects see. TestBox overlays your live app rather than creating a separate environment.

Standout feature: The fact that it's layered above your production environment (and not a simulation) means that you get all of the functionality and responsiveness of your production environment inside your demo sandbox.

Downside: You're still dependent on your production environment's stability and on keeping your personalized data in sync with what's required from your production environment. If production goes down or has performance issues, or even if a breaking change has been launched, your demo goes down with it.

Pricing: Starts around $45,000/year for small teams. Custom pricing based on usage.

Compare Testbox alternatives.

FAQs

What is a sandbox environment used for?

In B2B SaaS sales, sandbox environments serve several purposes: giving live demos without risk of exposing real customer data, sending leave-behinds so prospects can explore after calls, enabling champions to share internally with stakeholders who weren't on the demo, personalizing demos with prospect-specific data and branding, and bridging onboarding gaps when new customers are waiting for their real account to be provisioned. The common thread is giving people hands-on product experience without touching production systems or requiring account setup.

How long does it take to create a demo sandbox?

With modern HTML capture tools, you can create your first sandbox demo in under an hour. The tool captures your product as you click through your demo flow, then you just need to add any additional links between screens and anonymize/personalize content with a point and click editor.

Is a demo sandbox secure?

HTML capture sandboxes are inherently secure because they don't contain real customer data and don't connect to production systems - they're static captures of your product interface. Full environment clones require more careful data handling since they're running actual instances of your software, but when properly configured with isolated databases and test data, they're secure. The key is ensuring no real customer data ever appears in demo environments, regardless of approach.

Can I use the same tool for interactive product demos and sandbox demos?

Yes. Most modern demo platforms (including HowdyGo, Navattic, and Storylane) support both - HowdyGo even lets you convert one into the other. You might create a 90-second guided interactive demo for your homepage, then offer a full sandbox version as a leave-behind after discovery calls without maintaining separate captures.