Communities — now branded Experience Cloud — are branded, external-facing sites built on top of a Salesforce org. They let customers, partners, or employees log in to view and interact with Salesforce data through a customized web experience. Instead of building a separate web app and integrating it back to Salesforce, you build the site on Salesforce itself, with native access to CRM records, identity, sharing rules, and security.
Why organizations use them
| Use case | Site type |
|---|---|
| Customer self-service | Help center where customers can view their cases, search knowledge articles, and open new cases |
| Partner enablement | Portal where channel partners can register deals, manage leads, and access pricing |
| Employee hubs | Internal collaboration sites for HR docs, FAQs, project rooms |
| Patient / Member portals | Healthcare and benefits enrollment, scheduling, secure messaging |
| Public knowledge bases | Unauthenticated help content indexed by search engines |
| Marketplaces / Storefronts | (Often paired with Commerce Cloud) — product catalogs and ordering |
Key advantages over a bespoke web app
- Native data access. No integration layer — the site reads Salesforce records directly via Lightning Web Components, Aura, or pre-built templates.
- Built-in security model. Sharing rules, profiles, and permission sets apply to community users just like internal users (with community-specific extensions like Sharing Sets and Share Groups).
- Single sign-on. SSO via SAML, OAuth, and social logins comes out of the box.
- Mobile-responsive templates. Lightning Experience-based templates render on phone/tablet/desktop without custom CSS.
- Three releases a year. Like everything in Salesforce, new features arrive automatically.
How they differ from internal Salesforce
Community users use community licenses (Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, Partner Community, External Apps) — distinct from internal Salesforce licenses. These licenses have different sharing rules (sharing sets, share groups), different pricing models (per-user or per-login), and different feature ceilings (some standard objects are read-only or unavailable).
A quick example
A SaaS company with thousands of customers wants self-service support:
- Build a Customer Service community in Experience Cloud.
- Branded with the company’s logo and colors.
- Customers log in (or are SSO’d from the marketing site) and see their cases, their account, their orders.
- They can search the knowledge base and open new cases via a form that creates
Caserecords back in Service Cloud. - Support agents work the same
Caserecords inside the internal Salesforce org.
One platform, one data model, two user experiences — internal staff and external customers.
Verified against: Salesforce Help — Experience Cloud and Trailhead — Experience Cloud Basics. Last reviewed 2026-05-17.