Heroes’ jobs are never done. Their courageous, outstanding achievements and noble qualities take them to exciting new places as they blaze new trails. One such hero is the zealous Salesforce admin. Salesforce admins are at the helm, running Salesforce for their companies — the central nervous system of their organizations. Now that’s valiant.

Every heroic tale includes a sidekick — those trusty, always-by-your-side pals who often win the hearts of fans. For Salesforce admins, consider AppExchange your Robin the Boy Wonder. Here are 20 apps selected by Salesforce admins that drive results of heroic proportions. And for more admin apps and game-changing stories of admins, be sure to grab our latest ebook, 25 Salesforce Admins Share Their App Secrets to Success.

For mighty heroes:

“With Accounting Seed doing all of the heavy lifting, our account executives can focus on taking care of the customer and giving the customer a great experience.” - Dru Dalton, CEO, Real Thread

For super productive heroes:

“No matter what the sales team needed to do, with Velocify Pulse I could put it all in one place so they didn't have to hop around looking for what's next. That’s super productive.” - Angela Hunter, Marketing and Sales Operations Manager, Zuman

For powerful heroes:

“As a Salesforce System Administrator, I have come to appreciate the power and capabilities of Drawloop. Frankly I didn't realize all it could do until I had worked on this project to create and distribute Client Insertion Orders from Salesforce. The ability to read multiple tables, update multiple fields, and use Word as the document template, are all great features.” - Rich Spitz Director, Salesforce Admin, MediaMax Network

For time-saving heroes:

“FinancialForce is a huge time saver. Removing the redundancies of manual data entry and processes, and being able to have all departments working on one platform, has created huge efficiencies for Orthosensor.” - Erica Champine, Senior Salesforce Consultant, Orthosensor

For efficient heroes:

“Conga is well worth every penny you spend, because if you try to reinvent the wheel, you'll spend far more time and resources trying to do what Conga does.” - Joey Len, Salesforce Admin, Enovate Medical

For clever heroes:

“OwnBackup was the one tool we found that met our needs for Salesforce data (and metadata) backups and restores; and the restore functionality is where this tool really shined. It has the most automated and complete restore process that we found in the market, allowing you to do a full restore to revert to a previous backup.” - Kate Bishchoff, Salesforce Admin, Code42

For tactful heroes:

“You can automate pretty much anything — no matter what business you're in, or any business process you have — by structuring your organization with Salesforce and Tact.” - Ashley Evans, Salesforce Admin, TASC

For all-knowing heroes:

“As an admin for multiple sales teams in one org, my assignment rules and workflows were becoming cumbersome. NC2 Distribution Engine provides a solution for nearly every question surrounding lead assignment and tracking.” - Carly Mandel, Salesforce Admin, The Business Backer

For determined heroes:

“Once I took over the ownership of our Salesforce instance and realized that we had not been properly backing up our data, I freaked out; that is, until I discovered Spanning. With Spanning, I don’t even have to think about backing up my data. Spanning should be in every admin’s toolbox." - Stephanie Herrera, Senior Salesforce Manager, NFP

For all-encompassing heroes:

“We have nearly 500 Salesforce users, and almost as many Skuid licenses, because practically everyone is touching Salesforce in some way.” - Monica Lorey, System Admin, James Hardie

For helpful heroes:

“Enabler4Excel has been pivotal to me to work in Excel and sync data. I was introduced to it in my last job, and to be able to pull a report of accounts, push those accounts in, get a return of the new IDs, and then pull up the contacts and VLOOKUP to get the new account IDs we needed and push them in all from Excel...it’s really been helpful for me.” - Kristi Guzman, Salesforce MVP, Salesforce Operations Manager, MapAnything

For heroes who dream big:

“Snapshot by Dream Factory allows you to do a lot of comparisons and to move things between orgs that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to do otherwise. Being able to move things between sandboxes and different environments, it fits in perfectly for larger, enterprise companies.” - Sharif Shaalan, Salesforce MVP, Technical Architect Manager

For task-oriented heroes:

“TaskRay is great for very visual project management. I can move the task from ‘to-do’ to ‘in progress’ and I don’t have to tell anybody I did that. They can just go look. You don’t have to have that conversation with your project manager to say ‘I worked on this and this today.’ They just go look and see what you’re doing. It’s amazing, I love it. To reassign things, you just drag their little Chatter image onto the task, and all of a sudden they own it. Magic.” - Amber Boaz, Business Analyst, CodeScience

For well-respected heroes:

“DocuSign is a big one for people that need contracts signed. It’s globally known and respected, and it’s used in a lot of industries. We’ve used it and other apps for our challenges.” - Denise Carbone, Director of Client Engagements, RelationEdge

For the alert heroes:

“Popup Alerts by Riptide lets you put a ‘sticky note’ on a user’s record. Let’s say you used to refer to your industry as financial services, but suddenly your leadership says ‘We want to break that into either banking or insurance.’ You could put a popup alert for any of the records that equal financial services. The new time the record owner is in it, it will popup an alert that says, ‘Hey, please update the industry.’” - Susan Bruch, Director of Client Engagement, Accelerize 360

For attentive heroes:

“I’m a big user of SpringCM. We use them to install documents that are really important for us. What I love about SpringCM is that they stick with Salesforce security. Dropbox and the others are really great if you already have documents, but if you only use Salesforce as your main repository, SpringCM is a key app for me.” - Jean Michel Mougeolle, Salesforce MVP, CEO, SharinPix

For investigative heroes:

“The first thing I do at any new org that I’m trying to work with is install Field Trip. It’s a great way to really do some CSI-type investigation work at an org and figure out what you can clean up and what you can get rid of. And it’s free, so that’s always nice.” - Becka Dente, Salesforce MVP, Partner MTI Consulting

For well-assembled heroes:

“FormAssembly is really cool, because I can take online forms and send it to Salesforce. Without it, you’re having volunteers spend hours and days entering data. With it, you can have volunteers doing stuff for the mission instead of data entry. It’s a dynamic tool; people are creating sign-up forms to run their events, or processing payments, or logging volunteer hours. If you can dream it, you can do it with FormAssembly.” -  Nick Lindberg, Salesforce MVP, Non-Profit Delivery Director, Redpath Consulting Group

For agile heroes:

“We’ve implemented the Agile Accelerator, which is how Salesforce manages their software development process in that tool. It’s cool to be able to share that with customers.” - Mike Martin, Salesforce MVP, Client Partner, Appirio

For adaptable heroes:

“The number one app we use is called Object Converter. It’s a free app. Most of our data goes into leads, and we use Object Converter to essentially convert all the data into different objects, since lead conversion is very limited. I can click one button and have it create five different records. We use that pretty much for everything. If we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t be able to run our business as efficiently as we’ve been running it.” Alexandra Ervan, Associate Director of Information Services, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute

Download our latest ebook, 25 Salesforce Admins Share Their App Secrets to Success, today to read more about admins and their app secrets.