The Differences between Communities and Salesforce Portals

Nikita R.

Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.

Updated: Jan 13th, 2025

If you want to use Salesforce Cloud to effectively create web projects that suit your specific business needs, it’s best to understand the differences between communities and portals.

With that being said, is it time to take action and choose between a Salesforce community or a portal? Join us in the article below as we first explain communities and portals in detail and then cover the differences between these two Salesforce platforms. We finish the article with a few FAQs related to Salesforce communities and portals, so stick around until the end.

What is a Salesforce Community?

It’s an online platform from Salesforce and can also be considered a customer community portal, depending on your co-workers’ lingo. A Salesforce Community is usually created to help businesses connect directly with their customers, employees, and partners. If collaboration between your various stakeholders is part of your web project requirements, you could also provide features like discussion forums and groups to facilitate this need.

Salesforce Community is available under Salesforce Customer 360 and is highly customizable. These design options can be used to meet the specific brand direction of your company so that your audience has a seamless user and Salesforce experience when it comes to your offerings. Overall, Salesforce Community focuses on increasing your engagement with stakeholders by providing communication options. Additionally, you could also add self-service options to your Salesforce Community to empower users to troubleshoot problems independently and instantly.

Let’s take a quick look at some key features and components from Salesforce Communities:

Match the design of your portal to your business brand by adding logos, choosing colors, and selecting themes for your community.

Salesforce administrators can set up access permissions and security settings so that community members can only access relevant content and features intended for them.

Salesforce Community supports articles, documents, videos, and discussion groups so that your community members can access and share a variety of content.

Many organizations choose to add forums, blogs, and knowledge bases to their Salesforce communities.

What are Portals in Salesforce?

Salesforce has various options for creating portals depending on your business needs, such as self-service portals, Salesforce customer portals or communities, and partner communities. Portals give your business a way to share Salesforce data and functionality with customers, employees, and partners.

Let’s dive into some of the key features and tools from Salesforce to create a portal.

Salesforce Customer Portal

Customer portals are platforms where customers can view their account information, submit and track support tickets, and access resource libraries. So what is a customer portal in Salesforce? These web-based portals allow customers to access Salesforce services and information without having to contact customer support.

Salesforce Community Portal

Community portal Salesforce is an online platform that allows your customers, employees, and partners to obtain the content you upload. Your users can also engage with other community members in groups and discussion forums. Community portals help to streamline communication between users and encourage them to collaborate on ideas for products and services in your industry.

Partner Portal Salesforce

Salesforce Partner Portal allows Salesforce partners to access and manage accounts through a secure website. Using a partner portal in Salesforce Experience Cloud means partners also have access to resources and tools to help you grow your business. Partners can view and update their account information, and manage subscriptions and billing. Partner portals offer a resource library with training material, best practices, and documentation that support partners with using Salesforce effectively.

Essential Salesforce Self-Service Portals for Visitors

You can use Salesforce Customer Community to create a self-service portal. Is one of your project requirements related to branding? Not to worry, there are customization options in the Salesforce Customer Community to match your business brand.

Many organizations add knowledge articles and support cases to their self-service portal and set up user access and permissions to ensure that users view the content and features that are relevant to them. Self-service portals from Salesforce also integrate well with third-party applications.

Authentication & Security Options for Keeping Data Safe in Salesforce Web Portal

With Salesforce, your portals can have single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and security tokens. These security options help to keep your data safe and secure while the authentication options ensure that only authorized users have access to your portal content.

Mobile-Responsive Community and Customer Portals in Salesforce

Salesforce allows you to create mobile-responsive portals and communities. This feature stands out as it is critical for allowing users to access your portal content from a mobile device 24/7. Additionally, users can continue to perform tasks on the mobile-optimized portal seamlessly at their convenience.

Understanding Customer Community in Salesforce

You might be interested in a Customer Community if you need an online platform for your customers to interact with each other. Many organizations decide to build a Customer Community with Salesforce to interact directly with customers, read and provide support to their questions, and empower the community members to share feedback regarding your brand.

Here are two use cases for building Customer Communities.

Offer Self-Service Options

Build a Customer Community if you want to give your customers access to digital content such as knowledge articles, FAQs, or content they can generate independently.

These self-service options empower community members to research and fix their problems without the assistance of a customer support agent or technician. As you can imagine, this use case shows that you can reduce the number of customer queries submitted to your support teams. It also ensures that issues on your products and services are resolved quickly.

Improve Products & Services

Your Customer Community can be used to collect feedback and ideas from customers. You can then analyze the data to understand your customer’s needs and preferences to create detailed reports.

Executives and key stakeholders can use these reports to make data-driven decisions and plan product development roadmaps to improve products and services. Ultimately, these improvements give customers what they want to buy and increase business sales.

The Key Differences between Communities and Portals in Salesforce

Although Communities and Portals can create online platforms to interact with customers, employees, and partners, they do have differences! Please take a look at our comparison table below to explore the features, use cases, target audiences, and more between these two Salesforce products.

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.