Historically, Salesforce had three types of portals: Self-Service Portal, Customer Portal, and Partner Portal. All three are now retired or deprecated in favor of Communities (rebranded Experience Cloud in 2020). You can no longer create new portal sites in modern orgs, but the names still appear in legacy documentation and a few license labels.
Self-Service Portal
The earliest external-user feature — a minimal customer-facing site for logging and viewing cases. Limited to case management, no broader customization. Retired entirely; modern orgs cannot enable it.
Customer Portal
A more capable external site for customers — viewing accounts, contacts, cases, knowledge articles. Branded with the company’s CSS. Built on Visualforce + Classic UI. Customer Portal users had two license tiers:
- High Volume Customer Portal — for large customer bases; cheaper per-user but with limited sharing rules.
- Customer Portal Manager — for fewer, more privileged customer users with broader access.
Customer Portal is superseded by Customer Community (and Customer Community Plus) in Experience Cloud. Existing customer-portal-licensed users have been migrated by Salesforce over time.
Partner Portal
A site for channel partners — managing leads, opportunities, deal registrations, and partner-specific data. Had its own license tiers:
- Gold Partner — full-feature partner license.
- Silver Partner, Bronze Partner — tiered access levels.
Partner Portal is superseded by Partner Community (now Experience Cloud Partner Central template). Partner-portal licenses have been progressively migrated.
Why the rebrand and replacement
Portals had limitations Salesforce couldn’t fix without a clean replacement:
- No Lightning Experience or mobile-first rendering.
- Heavy Visualforce + Apex required for customization — no visual builder.
- Restricted feature set compared to internal users.
- Hard to brand beyond CSS overrides.
Communities (Experience Cloud) addressed all of these with templates, the visual Experience Builder, Lightning Web Component support, mobile-responsive design, and modern auth.
Quick interview answer
“Salesforce had three portal types: Self-Service Portal (most basic, retired), Customer Portal (now Customer Community), and Partner Portal (now Partner Community). All three were replaced by Communities in 2013, and Communities were rebranded Experience Cloud in 2020. Portals are deprecated; new builds use Experience Cloud.”
Verified against: Salesforce Help — Experience Cloud and historical release notes. Last reviewed 2026-05-17.