Portals were Salesforce’s pre-2013 framework for giving external users — customers and partners — login access to a Salesforce org. There were three flavors: Self-Service Portal, Customer Portal, and Partner Portal. They’ve been superseded by Communities (now Experience Cloud), and new portal sites can no longer be created in modern orgs. Existing portal-licensed users from pre-2013 orgs may still exist and are gradually migrated to corresponding community licenses.
Why this question still appears
Two reasons:
- Legacy orgs. Many enterprise Salesforce orgs date back to the portal era and still have portal-licensed users, portal-era sharing constructs, and old documentation that uses portal terminology.
- License naming. Some user license names still reference portal origins — “Customer Portal Manager”, “High Volume Customer Portal”, “Gold Partner” — even in modern orgs.
Quick comparison to today’s equivalent
| Portal era (pre-2013) | Today |
|---|---|
| Customer Portal | Customer Community / Experience Cloud customer site |
| Partner Portal | Partner Community / Experience Cloud partner site |
| Self-Service Portal | Retired entirely — closest equivalent is a public knowledge-base community |
What portals couldn’t do that communities can
- Mobile-responsive rendering out of the box.
- Lightning Experience UI.
- Visual builder (Experience Builder) for drag-and-drop layout.
- Modern social-login and SAML SSO support.
- Full Lightning Web Component support.
- Templates like Customer Service, Partner Central, Help Center.
Quick interview answer
“Portals were the original external-user framework — Self-Service Portal, Customer Portal, Partner Portal — built on Visualforce and Classic UI. They were replaced by Communities in 2013, which were rebranded Experience Cloud in 2020. Portals are deprecated; new builds always use Experience Cloud. The portal terminology still appears in legacy orgs and some license names.”
Verified against: Salesforce Help — Experience Cloud and historical Salesforce release notes. Last reviewed 2026-05-17.