Licenses are a gateway to authenticated access to your Experience Cloud sites. So one of
the most important steps when planning a site is selecting the right licenses for your use case.
These licenses grant access to Experience Cloud sites to customers and partners who can't
otherwise log in to your company's Salesforce org: External Identity, External Apps, Customer
Community, Customer Community Plus, Partner Community, and Channel Account. A Salesforce account
executive can help you understand the difference between the licenses, and help you decide the
best ones for your use case. Before that, let’s answer some basic questions first.
Required Editions
| Available in: both Salesforce Classic and
Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and
Developer Editions
|
Why Is This Important?
Licenses are an investment for your business, so license selection is key. Along with profiles
and permission sets, licenses give your customers more or fewer permissions and access to items
displayed on your site.
One way to look at your site’s relationship with licenses is to see it as an airplane. Each
passenger has a different type of ticket (license), and therefore, different levels of access.
They’re all on the same ride, but each passenger has a slightly different experience based on
how much their ticket cost.
Customer Community Licenses get a basic pass, like an economy ticket. Customer Community Plus
Licenses get more access, like a business ticket. Partner Community Licenses? They get much more
access, like a first-class ticket.
What Should You Keep in Mind?
When you’re considering Experience Cloud licenses for your site, start with your site’s goals,
and then find a license that aligns with them. Define and prioritize your use cases and how they
impact your company. After you define your site’s goals, the next step is to define the
different personas who can access the site. After you define your persona requirements, align
the license for each persona. Each persona and set of requirements can require different
licenses.
Here are some questions to consider when choosing among the various license types. This list
isn’t exhaustive, but it’s a good starting point.
- Who are your site’s users?
- How many users do you expect to access your site?
- Are your site’s users logging in to the site to do something, or are they simply browsing
and filling out the occasional form?
- How often do you expect users to log in to the site?
- What objects do you expect your users to access, and what type of access do they need, for
example, read, write, edit?
- Do your users need access to reports and dashboards?
- Do your users need extra platform capabilities such as API calls, data, and file storage?
- What type of sharing do you want your users to be able to access?
- Do you want your customers or partners to manage their own accounts, such as adding new
users for accounts they can access or disabling users?
In Enterprise, Performance, and
Unlimited editions, you can create up to 100 Experience
Cloud sites without buying communities licenses. However, you need licenses for some features
in Experience Cloud to work. For example, to create sites using the Partner Central template,
you must purchase at least one Partner Community license.
Active, inactive, and preview
sites, including Visualforce sites, count against this limit. Archived sites don’t count
against your maximum limit.
