Salesforce Sites vs. Experience Cloud: Decoding Differences for Enhanced Digital Experiences

Jessica B.

Seasoned technical writer giving you top Salesforce Tips.

Updated: Jan 13th, 2025

How You Can Implement Salesforce Community (AKA Experience Cloud)

Let’s first start with, what is community cloud? Salesforce Community Cloud (now known as Experience Cloud) enables your business to create branded online spaces, Salesforce community sites for users to connect with one another, encouraging information sharing and collaboration. You can create communities for a variety of users such as employees, customers, partners, or any other stakeholder.

Uses of Salesforce Communities

You can implement Salesforce Communities throughout your business in several ways.

Communities are a great tool to foster knowledge sharing, this can include best practices, troubleshooting resolution, and staying up to date for trends. This can be helpful when onboarding new employees or updating current employees on new policies.

Supplying a collaboration platform makes it easy for users to combine efforts on daily tasks or larger projects. Communities can be adopted for the purpose of providing support to customers by resolving issues, answering questions, or even upskilling. You can use your communities to market your products and services by sharing news and updates, promoting specific products, running competitions, or providing a space for users to learn more about your company.

Benefits of Using Salesforce Community

Not sure if there are any benefits to implementing a community cloud? Salesforce makes this work your while with a number of benefits for you to consider.

Communities provide a central location for knowledge sharing and collaboration which can assist with promoting knowledge sharing. Implementing a customer community can help enhance customer support by providing a platform for customers to assist one another and reach out to experts.

Communities can help enhance your marketing efforts by connecting directly with customers to generate leads and promote your products and services. You can reduce costs by providing a self-service portal which removes the need for expensive customer support resources.

Things to Keep in Mind

If your business is looking at implementing Salesforce communities, make sure you keep the following in mind.

First, ensure you have a clear goal in mind of what you want to achieve with your community. Salesforce offers a variety of features, ensure you select the ones that align with your goals. Your community needs to have active participants for your community to be successful so ensure you have the right people involved from the beginning.

Your community is only valuable if people are actively involved, promote your community once it is up and running to build up your user base.

What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

So, what is Salesforce Experience Cloud? Formerly known as the Community Cloud (which we have discussed above), Salesforce rebranded to the new and improved Salesforce Experience Cloud. This suite of cloud-based applications can help your organization create and manage digital experiences in Salesforce for your employees, customers, and partners. You can integrate your Experience Cloud Salesforce with your other Salesforce product to ensure a seamless customer experience.

Key Features of Experience Cloud

A drag-and-drop site builder.

Secure, self-service websites and portals for employees, customers, and partners.

Native mobile apps for Android and iOS devices.

Integrations with other Salesforce products and third-party apps.

Create customer websites to provide information about your product and service offering.

Build employee portals that employees can use to access resources, information, and tools.

Partner portals are a useful tool for hosting important information for your business partners.

Special communities can encourage your employees, customers, and partners to knowledge share and collaborate.

Benefits of Using Salesforce Experience Cloud

By utilizing Experience Cloud, you can increase customer, employee, and partner engagement by providing them with a tailored interactive experience. By providing users with the information they need to carry out their tasks, you can improve productivity.

Experience Cloud is a secure platform which means your data is protected and compliant with regulations. This scalable platform will grow as your business does which means no switching to new software as your needs increase.

If your business is exploring creating an interactive digital experience for your users then Salesforce Experience Cloud is a good option to consider.

Key Features of Salesforce Sites

Salesforce Sites allows your organization to create public-facing custom websites that are integrated with your Salesforce data. While this is fast becoming a legacy product, Salesforce still do market it on their website.

Key Aspects of Salesforce Sites

Keep reading to learn about some key aspects of Salesforce Sites:

Your organization can develop custom web apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This means you can create branded tailored websites that match your organization’s look and feel.

Salesforce Sites seamlessly integrates with other Salesforce products which means you can ensure your data stays consistent across platforms.

You can restrict access to your Salesforce Sites so that only authorized users can see the data of the site.

You can leverage Lightning Components and Visualforce pages to create a custom user interface within Salesforce.

You can employ Salesforce Sites to manage your content, making it easy to publish and edit content without using a separate content management system.

Sites are mobile-responsive which ensures your users have a good experience no matter which device they use to access the website.

You can track site performance, and user interactions using Salesforce’s reporting and analytics tools.

In the past, if you were looking to extend your Salesforce capabilities to provide an interactive online experience for your stakeholders then Salesforce Sites is a good option for you to keep in mind. These days though, we highly recommend Experience Cloud, which is a new and improved version of Sites and Community.

Extend Experience Cloud with Titan Web

Building communities using Salesforce Experience Cloud can involve a steep learning curve, especially for any Salesforce newbies. If you are looking for an easy-to-use alternative to Salesforce Experience Cloud then consider Titan. Titan is a fully integrated Salesforce experience builder that uses a drag-and-drop interface which means you don’t need any coding knowledge to start creating your very own Salesforce customer community. All Titan websites and portals have live push and pull Salesforce data to ensure consistency across your platforms. Easily tailor the look and feel of your sites using Titan’s extensive customization options.

FAQs

What is Salesforce Experience Cloud sites?

The Salesforce Experience Cloud is an online social platform that enables your business to connect with your employees, customers, and partners and provide valuable information.

What are Salesforce Sites?

Salesforce Sites enable you to create public apps and sites that are integrated with Salesforce without requiring users to login with credentials. You can make your Salesforce information public through a branded URL.

Is Salesforce Experience Cloud worth it?

The Salesforce Experience Cloud is a comprehensive digital experience platform that empowers businesses to create tailored experiences for partners, customers, and employees.

Who uses Experience Cloud in Salesforce?

Companies employ the Experience Cloud to create an engaging customer community. Salesforce makes it easy to make engaging communities that foster knowledge sharing and collaboration by creating experience cloud site in Salesforce.

We hope to see you soon!

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Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.