In recent years, established heat transfer models for dropwise condensation (DWC) have been refined to consider the influence of wetting behavior, surface structure and nucleation dynamics on the heat transfer rate in more detail. Despite these efforts to develop more sophisticated models, uncertainties of the model parameters still lead to a high variation of the calculated heat transfer rate. In this study, we apply quantitative sensitivity analysis to a pure steam DWC heat transfer model in order to attribute the variation of the model result to its input parameters. Four scenarios with different variations of the model parameters are discussed and sensitivity coefficients for each parameter are calculated. Our results show that the contact angle and the nucleation site density have the greatest influence on the model result if no additional coating layer is considered. The influence of the nucleation site density is mainly due to the large uncertainties associated with this parameter. In scenarios with an additional coating layer, the heat flux is mainly governed by the thickness of the coating layer, underlining the need for thin conformal coatings to effectively promote DWC. Furthermore, trends within the heat transfer model are discussed and beneficial conditions for a high heat flux are identified for each scenario. The results underline that the wetting properties of functional surfaces should be tailored towards medium contact angles in the range of 70° to 130° and low contact angle hystereses below 10° to achieve high heat flux DWC.