SuiteBundler
Pros:
- User-friendly and intuitive.
- Well-understood as it has been around for a while.
- Superior handling of circular dependencies, conflicts, list entry IDs, etc. than SDF
Cons:
- NetSuite is no longer releasing new features to SuiteBundler.
- SuiteBundler does not preserve form layout.
- Resets form layout on subsequent bundle installations/updates.
When to Use: Consider bundler if you understand its quirks and are not deploying heavily customized transaction or entry forms. Even with complex form customizations, bundler can still be used for the initial form deployment just to get going. However, future updates will need to be done via other methods as bundler will reset the layout.
SDF
Pros:
- Excellent for code deployments and lends itself towards CI/CD operations thanks to the command line interface that is part of the SDK.
- Supports more customization types than bundler.
- Does not reset form layout after the initial deployment.
Cons:
- Not accessible to non-developers and is not very user-friendly.
- Does not fully preserve form layout.
- Hard to debug and sometimes produces annoying warnings (creating a blank SDF project and trying to deploy it might sometimes fail or produce a lot of warnings!).
- Does not support deletion.
When to Use: If you are a developer and primarily deploy source code, SDF is a great option.
Copy to Account
Pros:
- More accessible than SDF and can be used by non-developers.
Cons:
- Not available for some customization types supported by SDF.
- Inherits SDF’s limitations.
When to Use:If you need to do a quick deployment of light customizations, one at a time.