Yes — external users need community licenses. Customers, partners, and other external users that log into an Experience Cloud (Community) site need a community-specific license: Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, Partner Community, or External Apps. These are separate SKUs from internal Salesforce licenses (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud). Internal users — your employees who already have a Salesforce license — can access the same community sites with their existing license at no extra cost.
Why a separate license
Community users are typically many more than internal users — a single customer-service team of 50 internal agents might serve a community of 50,000 logged-in customers. Charging the internal-user rate for 50,000 customers would be economically unworkable, so Salesforce created lower-cost community licenses that:
- Grant access to a curated subset of standard objects.
- Honor community-specific sharing constructs (Sharing Sets, Share Groups) instead of full sharing rules in some cases.
- Are priced per user or per login, depending on the SKU.
License families
| License | Audience | Pricing model | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Community | Customers (high-volume) | Per user or per login | Self-service support, B2C portals |
| Customer Community Plus | More privileged customers | Per user or per login | Customers who need deeper access (sharing rules, reports) |
| Partner Community | Channel partners | Per user or per login | Partner portals — leads, opportunities |
| External Apps / External Apps Plus | Custom external apps | Per user or per login | Industry-specific external sites with custom data models |
Each has feature limits and per-org caps documented in the Communities User Licenses guide.
Per-user vs per-login pricing
A key cost lever:
- Per-user (a.k.a. “member-based”) — pay a fixed monthly fee per assigned user, unlimited logins per month.
- Per-login — pay per login event; cheaper per-month if users log in rarely, but bills add up if they log in often.
Choose based on expected login frequency. A B2C self-service community where customers log in once per quarter is cheaper on per-login. A daily-use partner portal is cheaper on per-user.
Internal users on communities
If an internal employee (with a Salesforce or Sales Cloud license) needs to use a community, they don’t need a community license — their existing internal license is sufficient. Internal users see the community the same way customers do, but with the broader permissions of their internal profile.
Quick interview answer
“Yes — external community users need a community-specific license: Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, Partner Community, or External Apps. Each comes in per-user or per-login pricing. Internal users access communities with their existing internal license at no extra cost. The separate license exists because external user counts dwarf internal ones, and Salesforce prices them at a fraction of internal-user cost.”
Verified against: Salesforce Help — Communities User Licenses. Last reviewed 2026-05-17.