Setup Home
Setup Home is the landing page of the Salesforce Setup menu in Lightning Experience.
Definition
Setup Home is the landing page of the Salesforce Setup menu in Lightning Experience. It is the screen you reach when you click the gear icon in the top corner and choose Setup, and it gives you one place to start any administrative task in your org.
The page combines a Quick Find search box, a tree of setup nodes grouped into Administration, Platform Tools, and Settings, an Object Manager tab, a Recent Items list, and a carousel of quick-access tiles. Salesforce also surfaces recommendations and status messages here so admins can spot work that needs attention before opening individual pages.
How Setup Home is built and how admins use it
Where Setup Home sits in the interface
Setup Home is not part of an app's normal navigation. You reach it from the gear icon in the top right of Lightning Experience, then by selecting Setup. The page opens in its own browser tab in most orgs, which keeps your admin work separate from the records and list views your users see. That separation is deliberate. It lets you keep a record page open in one tab while you adjust a field or page layout in another. The page itself has two main tabs at the top. The Home tab is the default and shows the Setup tree, search, recent items, and recommendation tiles. The Object Manager tab is a second entry point where every standard and custom object lives, so you can jump straight to fields, page layouts, validation rules, and record types for a single object. Most admins live between these two tabs all day. Understanding that Setup Home is the hub, and Object Manager is the object-shaped view of the same data, makes the whole experience easier to reason about.
The Setup tree: Administration, Platform Tools, Settings
The left side of Setup Home is a collapsible tree of nodes. In Lightning Experience this tree is grouped into three top-level sections. Administration covers people and access, so Users, Permission Sets, Profiles, Roles, and data management tools sit here. Platform Tools uses a more process-oriented layout, with subgroups such as Apps, Objects and Fields, Process Automation, User Interface, Custom Code, and Environments. Settings holds company-wide configuration like Company Information, Security, and Identity. This grouping matters because it mirrors how admin work actually breaks down. When you need to change automation, you expand Process Automation under Platform Tools rather than hunting alphabetically. When you onboard a user, everything you need is under Administration. New admins should spend a few minutes expanding each section once, just to build a mental map. After that, the Quick Find box usually gets you to a node faster than clicking through the tree, but knowing the structure helps when you are exploring features you have not used before.
Quick Find: the search box admins actually use
The Quick Find box sits at the top of the Setup tree and is the fastest way to reach any setup node by name. Type a keyword such as "flows" or "sharing settings" and the tree filters to matching pages as you type. Salesforce documentation calls Quick Find a power tool for getting where you need to go, and most experienced admins reach for it before the tree. Quick Find matches on node names, so it works best when you know roughly what a feature is called. Searching "profiles" takes you to Profiles, "audit" takes you to View Setup Audit Trail, and "company" takes you to Company Information. It does not search inside records or metadata, so it will not find a specific field by its label. For that you use Object Manager. A practical habit is to use Quick Find for the eight or ten pages you touch most often, and to browse the tree only when you are looking for something unfamiliar. Quick Find also respects your permissions, so you only see nodes you are allowed to open.
Recent Items, quick-access tiles, and recommendations
Below the search, the Home tab shows context that changes based on your activity and your org. The Recent Items list shows the records and customization features you opened most recently in Setup, which makes it easy to return to a field or rule you were just editing without searching again. A carousel of quick-access tiles gives one-click entry to common setup destinations and onboarding flows. Setup Home also surfaces recommendations and status messages. These can point to unassigned licenses, expiring certificates, security findings, or release updates that need attention. The value here is that the platform raises these items before they cause a problem on a record page or in an integration. Treating the recommendations as a to-do checklist, rather than scrolling past them, often catches issues early. The exact tiles and messages vary by edition, enabled features, and your permissions, so two admins in different orgs may see different content on their Setup Home.
Setup Home is not the Lightning Experience Home page
A common point of confusion is the word Home. Setup Home is the admin landing page inside Setup. The Lightning Experience Home page is a completely different screen that your end users see when they log in. The user-facing Home page focuses on sales priorities and includes components like the Assistant, a performance chart for quarterly sales, Today's Events, Today's Tasks, and Recent Records. You build and assign that user Home page with the Lightning App Builder, and you can give different profiles or apps different Home pages. Setup Home, by contrast, is fixed platform UI. You do not design it in App Builder. You can tune small parts of the Setup experience, such as System Overview messages and which fields appear in the Recently Viewed list, but the layout of Setup Home itself is controlled by Salesforce. Keeping these two pages straight saves a lot of confusion when someone asks you to "change the Home page," because the answer depends entirely on which Home they mean.
Permissions, editions, and what you can see
Reaching Setup at all requires the right access. Standard users without admin permissions do not get the full Setup menu. The View Setup and Configuration permission lets a user open Setup pages in a read context, while changing configuration needs permissions tied to each area, often through the Customize Application or Modify All Data permissions on a profile or permission set. Because Setup respects these permissions, the tree and Quick Find results you see are scoped to what your access allows. Editions also shape what appears. Some nodes, tiles, and recommendations only show up when a feature is enabled or licensed in your org. That is why following along with a tutorial can be confusing if your edition lacks a feature the author has. When you cannot find a setup node you expect, the cause is usually one of three things: the feature is not enabled, your edition does not include it, or your user lacks the permission. Checking those three before assuming the page is missing will save time. Setup Audit Trail, reachable from Setup, records who changed what, which pairs well with the recent changes you scan on Setup Home.
Tune your Setup experience
You cannot redesign Setup Home in App Builder, but you can tune parts of the Setup experience so it works better for your team. These settings live in Setup itself and apply org-wide or per profile, depending on the option.
- Open Setup
Click the gear icon in the top right of Lightning Experience and choose Setup. Setup Home opens, usually in a new browser tab. Confirm you have admin access, because the full menu only appears for users with Setup permissions.
- Configure System Overview messages
In the Quick Find box type System Overview, open the page, and review the usage and limit cards. Use the related System Overview settings to control which messages appear, so your team sees the warnings that matter and not noise.
- Tune the Recently Viewed list
Search Quick Find for the option that controls which fields appear in the Recently Viewed list, then choose the fields that help admins recognize records at a glance. This affects the Recent Items experience across Setup.
- Pin Quick Find habits and review recommendations
Decide on the handful of nodes your team uses daily and standardize searching for them by name. On each visit, scan the recommendation tiles and the recent changes so issues like expiring certificates surface early.
A Setup page showing usage against key org limits, such as data and API usage, with messages you can configure for visibility.
The setting that controls which fields display in the Recently Viewed list, shaping what the Recent Items area shows in Setup.
The keyword search box at the top of the Setup tree; the fastest way to open any node you can name.
The second Setup tab where standard and custom objects live, used to reach fields, layouts, and rules for one object.
- Setup Home layout itself is fixed platform UI; you cannot edit it in the Lightning App Builder the way you edit the user Home page.
- The tiles, recommendations, and nodes you see depend on your edition, enabled features, and permissions, so another admin's Setup Home can look different.
- Do not confuse Setup Home with the Lightning Experience Home page that users see; changing one does nothing to the other.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Setup Home PageSalesforce
- Optimize Salesforce Navigation and SetupSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Setup Home.
- Setup Home PageSalesforce
- Home Apps and Home Pages in Lightning ExperienceSalesforce
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Setup Home.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
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