We all know how much Salesforce products are used worldwide for its features, resources they provide, ease of implementation, and many more reasons. With every product they release, they go one step further in providing their customers with world-class solutions. And of course, every product is updated keeping in mind easy integration with its CRMs. Today we are going to talk about Salesforce Communities in detail and understand its different licenses and which one to use.

What is Salesforce Community?

In 2013, Salesforce introduced Community cloud with an aim to create a platform for customers, partners, and employees. It provides companies to work effectively, understand their customers’ requirements, and fulfill it. In simple terms, you can also say that the Salesforce community is the advanced version of portals.

With the help of communities, your users can work collaboratively. It is built on the Salesforce platform and easily integrates with CRM.

Communities are developed such that they can be perfect choices for your partners, customers, vendors, employees, or anyone else.

Let’s see each type in brief:

- Customer Community

- Customer Community Plus

- Partner Community

You can see each of them in brief and understand the differences between portals and communities in our previous blog post here.

Each of them has its own merits and demerits. They are a vital part of Salesforce products and can be useful in a variety of professions. Over the years, communities help a lot to enhance businesses in three major areas.

- Enhance brand experience

- Provide a dedicated space to users

- Culture of collaboration

Costs of each of them and features they provide:

Customer community/ Partner Community is available for $2/ login or $5/member on a monthly basis. It provides features like:

- Digital Experience Management

- Customer Service and Account Portal Templates

- Knowledge

- Case Management

- Lightning Flow Automation

On the other hand, Customer Community Plus is available for $6/ login or $15/ member on a monthly basis. In addition, to the above features in Customer Community Plus, you get below features.

- Roles and Advanced Sharing

- Delegated Administration

- Customizable Reports and Dashboards

Talking about the licenses, Salesforce provides access to these communities’ plans in various licenses.

Salesforce provides licenses in six different types of licenses. Listed below:

• Customer Community:

It is useful for business to consumer experiences using large numbers of external users who need access to case objects or knowledge. You can also use the customer community with personal accounts.

• Customer Community Plus:

Customer Community Plus is useful for business to consumer experiences with external users who have access to reports and dashboards and need advanced sharing options. Customer Community Plus can also be used with personal accounts.

• Partner Community:

Partner community is useful for B2B communication. It gives access to sales data like partner relationship management and can’t be useful for personal accounts.

• Commerce Portals:

Commerce portals are for custom digital experience to engage any external users, like brand engagement and customer loyalty. It provides limited access to CRM objects and can be used with personal accounts.

• External Apps:

External apps are very customizable experiences while incorporating CRM objects, custom objects, and external data and require additional storage. Its ideal use case is a dealer, vendor, or supplier portal. It is useful for franchise management, marketplaces, and multi-level marketing. The external app's license cannot be useful with personal accounts.

• Channel Account:

It is useful for business to business communities and portals that calculate their usage on the basis of numbers of partners instead of numbers of individual users.

Each of the above mentioned licenses is available in two ways i.e.:

- Member-based

- Login-based

Difference between both types of license:

Community member-based license is similar to standard Salesforce internal license. External users who have member-based licenses can have access to a community multiple times. But, they do not have access to internal organizations.

Whereas, in login based license you need to purchase a specific number of logins for monthly usage. Here, external users can use one log in each time they log into the community. After that, they can use the same credentials multiple times for the same day. Additionally, once logged in they can easily switch between communities. You can configure the session timeout period of login to a maximum of 24 hours.

Well, that's a lot of information about the Salesforce license. Now, comes the main question. Which license should you purchase?

All types of licenses serve different purposes. Decide on the basis of your company’s requirements and see to it that it fulfills the requirements.

If you are still establishing yourself in the market and thinking of going with a portal then Salesforce customer portal is where you should get started.