Experience Cloud User Licenses

Important Experience Cloud sites use community user licenses.

This topic is intended for Salesforce administrators who want to learn more about the differences between the user licenses intended for external users.

Salesforce packages licenses in specific stock keeping units (SKUs) to sell to customers. SKUs contain one or more licenses and capabilities. Generally, the name of the SKU and the license match, but not always. For example, there are two SKUs that sell the Partner Community license: the Partner Relationship Management SKU and the External Apps SKU. While both SKUs sell the Partner Community license, the External Apps SKU offers more platform capacity in the form of custom objects, file and data storage, and APIs.

After they’re purchased, license names (not SKU names) appear in Setup > Company Information.

To learn which SKU and license combination is the best fit for your business needs, contact your Salesforce account executive.

A community license works like a standard Salesforce internal license: external users with a member-based license (that is, a license that is assigned to a specific user) are able to access a community as many times as they want. However, external users don’t have access to the internal org.

The External Identity license is a standalone license that you can buy to deliver identity services, like single sign-on and passwordless login, to your customers and partners. To expand user access and capabilities, you can upgrade your External Identity license to a community license at any time. For more information, see External Identity License Details.

Frequently Asked Questions About External Licenses

Do I need communities licenses in my org to create Experience Cloud sites?

In Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited orgs, you can create up to 100 Experience Cloud sites without buying communities licenses. However, you must purchase licenses to use specific templates and functionality. For example, to create sites using the Partner Central template, you must purchase at least one Partner Community license. You must have an active community license in your org to use the Archive Site functionality.

You can have up to 100 Experience Cloud sites in your Salesforce org. Active, inactive, and preview sites, including Visualforce sites, count against this limit.

Do I need communities licenses in my org to give access to Experience Cloud sites?

There are two types of access to Experiences Cloud sites: authenticated and unauthenticated access. Authenticated users log in to the site, whereas unauthenticated users are considered guest users. Even without community licenses, guest users have some access to your sites (such as to login and error pages). Purchase licenses for external users to allow members to log in or give access to Salesforce objects based on your business needs. Purchasing external licenses also allows you to create external profiles (beyond the guest user profile) to access your sites.

Note If a community license contract isn’t renewed and the license is removed from your org, existing members continue to have access to sites they’ve been added to. Deactivate sites that you wish to discontinue to ensure security.

If you intend to use your Experience Cloud site as a public knowledge base for unauthenticated users, you don’t have to purchase community licenses. For example, guest users can access publicly available Experience Cloud site pages to read knowledge articles.

Note If your org has legacy portal licenses for authenticated users, you don’t have to purchase or convert to community licenses for your authenticated users. You can use legacy portal licenses for sites created with Experience Cloud.

We highly discourage the use of internal licenses for external use cases. External user licenses are the only licenses suited to securely access an external-facing portal or site.

Are community licenses associated with users or a site?

Communities licenses are associated with users, not a specific site. If needed, you can move users with these licenses between sites, and users with community licenses can access multiple sites simultaneously. If you have unused licenses, you can assign them to users in any Experience Cloud site in your org.

Here's another way to think about it: Your Experience Cloud site is like an extension of your Salesforce org that allows users (external and internal) to interact and have selected access to data and functionality. A user’s exact access depends on what the license allows.

In addition to supporting communities licenses, Experience Cloud sites support all internal and portal licenses, including existing Customer Portal, Authenticated Website, and partner portal licenses.

Check out Experience Cloud Sites and Users in Your Salesforce Org, a quick video about how Salesforce Experiences live in an org, the differences between licenses, and how Salesforce accounts and site users are associated with one another.

How is a license used in an employee community?

Two underlying licenses support Employee Community licenses—the Salesforce Platform user license and the Company Community for Lightning Platform permission set license. To assign a Lightning Platform Starter or Lightning Platform Plus license to a user, first assign the Salesforce Platform user license. Then assign them the Company Community for Lightning Platform permission set license. (Sometimes, you have to create the permission set before you can assign the license.)

When you upgrade from Lightning Platform Starter license to Lightning Platform Plus license, you get more custom objects, and you don’t have to make changes in Setup. Lightning Platform and Lightning Platform Plus License Details has more about what is included with these licenses.

How are Channel Licenses used?

Channel Licenses are optimized for use with partners, and give you the power to buy a specific number of licenses for your partner accounts. Each partner account with an assigned license is given up to 40 partner users. User licenses are pooled, making it less likely for individual partners to exceed their user limits. More users, beyond the typical 40, can be purchased if necessary.

How do community licenses compare to legacy portal licenses?

Here’s a quick correlation of the new communities licenses with their older portal counterparts and their main use case.

Important Users who have portal licenses can access your site as long as you include them by adding the profiles or permission sets that they’re associated with to your site. You don’t have to purchase new licenses for them, or swap them for communities licenses.

Note Different license types can access your Experience Cloud sites. Your site isn’t limited to just one type of license.

What are login-based licenses?

Each community license can be either a member-based license or a login-based license. To use a login-based license, you first purchase a specific number of logins to be used every month. External users associated with that license consume one login each time they log into a site. However, logging in multiple times during the same day still only consumes one login and, after they’re logged in, switching between sites doesn’t consume extra logins. This type of login is referred to as a daily unique login.

The ratio between the number of monthly logins you purchase and the number of login licenses that are provisioned in your org is 1–20. For example, if you purchase 1,000 monthly logins, then 20,000 login licenses are provisioned in your org. If you want to assign more than 20,000 login licenses, purchase more logins. Why the large ratio? We want to make sure that you have enough licenses to assign to all the login-based users you potentially create.

The timeout period for a session is configurable up to a maximum of 24 hours.

How are login overages calculated?

Login overages are calculated over a 12-month period from the start date of the contract. Entitlements roll over from month to month. If you purchase 1,000 monthly logins, you’re entitled to a total of 12,000 annual logins.

In November 2017, we introduced the concept of daily unique logins and beginning on April 1, 2018, they’re used to calculate overages.

How can you monitor your login consumption?

You can monitor your login consumption checking the LoginHistory table. In Salesforce Classic, the table is in Setup | Administer | Manage Users. In Lightning Experience, Setup | Identity.

If you want to check your aggregated login consumption for the current month, use the Usage-based Entitlements list. In Salesforce Classic, find it in Setup | Administer | Company Information. In Lightning Experience, it’s in Setup | Company Information.

Is an extra license required to use Experience Builder?

Sites, portals, and communities using a component-based template use Experience Builder to add and edit custom, branded pages. Users with the “Create and Set Up Experiences” permission automatically have full site administrator access to Experience Builder

Do Experience Cloud sites have user or role limits?

For a standard Experience Cloud site, we recommend using the following license types based on the expected number of users.

Note Experience Cloud can support a larger scale of users per org for any of our license types if your community, site, or portal needs more users. To find out if your site needs an in-depth review, consult with your Salesforce account representative. If so, we can provide performance recommendations to ensure your site scales properly to meet your demands.

Some licenses, such as Customer Community Plus and Partner Community, require roles associated with an external user record. An increase in the number of roles in your org degrades performance, so make sure that you don’t use more roles than necessary. The default number of roles used in an org’s portals or communities is 50,000. This limit includes roles associated with all of the organization’s customer portals, partner portals, or communities. When you reach your portal role limit, you can’t create more users. Salesforce emails you when you reach 95% of your limit, so you have time to make adjustments before you run out of roles. To prevent reaching this limit, which can impact performance, review and reduce the number of roles. If you’re expecting a high-volume of users, enable account role optimization (ARO). ARO delays the account role creation process until there’s a second user on an account, and roles become necessary to support sharing data between them. You can also delete unused roles.

If you’ve enabled account role optimization and still require more roles for your site, you can increase the number of roles by designating person account owner power users. Person account owner power users can own a large number of either customer or partner users. They can’t change their role, look up to a parent role, or reparent their role. Person account owner power user objects can't be created if deferred sharing is turned on for your org. Create a PersonAccountOwnerPowerUser object via API. Enter the user ID of the power user and the type of users that they can own, Customer or Partner.

Note Only users at the highest level of a hierarchy can be added to the PersonAccountOwnerPowerUser object.

Are guest users counted against my licenses?

Not at all! Unauthenticated or guest users who access your Experience Cloud site don’t use up any of your external licenses.

Here are the page view limits for guest users, based on your Salesforce edition. Overages are calculated on a yearly basis. If your growing community exceeds this number of guest user page views, contact your Salesforce account representative to increase your page view limits.

For example, a site set up in an Enterprise Edition org can have up to 6 million page views over the course of a year. Overages will be calculated after the annual limit has been reached. See Experience Cloud Site Usage Limits for more information about page view and other user limits.

License Details

By design, the out-of-the-box object permissions of user profiles associated with community licenses are rather restricted. In this table, we outline user profile settings that are available to profiles with Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, Partner Community, External Apps, or Channel Account licenses.

Note As a best practice, always clone the standard profile associated with a community license, and change object permissions as needed. If you want to limit the number of cloned profiles, use permission sets to assign object permissions.

License Name	External Apps License2	Customer Community License	Customer Community Plus License	Partner Community License3	Channel Account License
SKU Name	Commerce Portals SKU	Customer Community SKU	Customer Community Plus SKU	Partner Relationship Management (PRM) SKU External Apps SKU	Channel Account SKU
Use Case	B2C	B2C	B2B	B2B	B2B
Salesforce Standard Objects
Account Contact Relationships (Contacts to Multiple Accounts)4
Accounts	Read, Edit	Read, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
Assets	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
Campaigns				Read, Create, and Edit5	Read, Create, and Edit6
Cases	Read	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit 7	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
Contacts	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
Contracts	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete
Dashboards			Read Only
Documents	Read Only	Read Only	Read Only	Read Only	Read Only
Entitlements		Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
External Objects (Salesforce Connect)	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
Events and Calendar		Read 8	Read, Create, Edit, Delete 9	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete
Ideas	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create	Read, Create	Read, Create	Read, Create
Leads				Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
List Views	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
Notes and Attachments		Exceptions apply 10
Opportunities				Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
Orders	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete
Price Books	Read Only	Read Only	Read Only	Read Only	Read Only
Products	Read Only	Read Only	Read Only	Read Only	Read Only
Quotes	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete
Reports11			Create and Manage	Create and Manage	Create and Manage
Return Orders		Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
Salesforce CMS Functionality 12
Service Appointment		Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
Task	Read Only	Read, Create, Edit, Delete 13	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete	Read, Create, Edit, Delete
Work Order		Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
Work Order Line Item		Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit	Read, Create, Edit
Salesforce Features, Capability, and Custom Objects
Extra Data Storage	10 MB per user (member-based license)		2 MB per user (member-based license) 1 MB per user (login-based license)	When purchased with the PRM SKU: 5 MB per user (member-based license) 1 MB per user (login-based license) When purchased with the External Apps SKU: 45 MB per user (member-based license) 20 MB per login (login-based license)	5 MB per user (member-based license) 1 MB per user (login-based license)
API Calls per Day (by Org)	200 calls per day per user (member-based license) 400 calls per day per user (login-based license)	0	200 calls per day per user (member-based license) 10 calls per day per user (login-based license)	When purchased with the PRM SKU: 200 calls per day per user (member-based license) 10 calls per day per user (login-based license) When purchased with the External Apps SKU: 1000 calls per day per user (member-based license) 400 calls per day per user (login-based license)	200 calls per day per user (member-based license) 10 calls per day per user (login-based license)
Chatter (People, Groups, Feeds, Private Messages)
Custom Objects	100 custom objects per license (custom objects in managed packages don’t count towards this limit, as long as they’re made publicly available on AppExchange)	10 custom objects per license (custom objects in managed packages don’t count towards this limit, as long as they’re made publicly available on AppExchange)	10 custom objects per license (custom objects in managed packages .. don’t count towards this limit, as long as they’re made publicly available on AppExchange)	When purchased with the PRM SKU: 10 custom objects per license When purchased with the External Apps SKU: 100 custom objects per license Custom objects in managed packages don’t count towards this limit, as long as they’re made publicly available on AppExchange.	10 custom objects per license (custom objects in managed packages don’t count towards this limit, as long as they’re made publicly available on AppExchange))
Delegated Administration
Einstein Lead Scoring and Einstein Opportunity Scoring14
Einstein Sales Emails15
Enhanced List Views for Sales objects: Contact Intelligence View, Lead Intelligence View, and Pipeline Inspection16
Files1718	Content Libraries aren't available with External Apps licenses.	Content Libraries aren't available with Customer Community licenses.	Create, Read, Edit, Delete	Create, Read, Edit, Delete	Create, Read, Edit, Delete
Knowledge
Market Development Funds
Roles and Standard Sharing
Sharing Sets19
Salesforce App
Send Email20					21
Territory Management
Recognition Badges22
Workflow Approvals		23

Note Starting with Summer ’13, the Customer Portal user license isn’t available for new orgs. You can create a customer portal using the Customer Account Portal Lightning template in Experience Builder.

Existing orgs using Customer Portal licenses may continue to use their licenses.

If you’re still working with the Customer Portal, see the Customer Portal Guide for more information.