Salesforce Experience Cloud vs. Community Cloud

Jessica B.

Seasoned technical writer giving you top Salesforce Tips.

Updated: Jan 13th, 2025

What is Salesforce Community Cloud?

In a nutshell, the Community Cloud is an online digital experience platform by Salesforce that assists businesses across various industries to better reach and manage their relationships with employees, customers, and partners.

Does the Salesforce Community Cloud Still Exist?

Have you been searching for the Community Cloud and wondering if it still exists? The answer is yes and no. The Salesforce Community Cloud was rebranded to the Salesforce Experience Cloud. The same technology and features that largely made up what is Community Cloud in Salesforce still remain with a focus on creating Salesforce communities and digital experiences.

The software industry is constantly evolving so the customer Experience Cloud might look a little different from the Community Cloud. Salesforce does apply updates and make changes to its offering so ensure you visit the Salesforce website or contact Salesforce directly to get the latest information about their offerings.

What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

Now that we know about the rebrand, let’s move on to the next question ‘What is Experience Cloud in Salesforce?’ The Salesforce Experience Cloud is a platform you can use to create branded customer experience clouds and online communities for your business to interact with your employees, customers, and partners.

Creating a customer community in Salesforce should be designed to provide access to relevant resources and information while facilitating communication, engagement, and collaboration with communities. If you have a specific audience or subject in mind for your experience cloud, Salesforce will enable your business to build a tailored interactive website or self-service portal.

Key Experience Cloud Features

Here’s a quick overview of some Experience Cloud features:

Community Building: You can create customized communities using templates and layouts that are branded to your business and match your requirements.

Member Engagement: By implementing engagement tools such as groups, chat, and discussion forums you can encourage members to collaborate and share information with one another.

Employee Engagement: Create internal communities for employees to collaborate and information share with one another. This can help to enhance productivity and knowledge sharing.

Partner Collaboration: Partner Portals are a vital tool if you need to collaborate and information share with your business partners.

Access Control: Need to share sensitive information with only specific users? Administrators can control access rights to information so only members inside a specific community can see the information.

Content Sharing: Experience Cloud provides a platform for community members to share information and resources securely.

Integration: Salesforce Experience Cloud seamlessly integrates with other Salesforce products and integrated third-party apps.

Personalization: Based on your Salesforce data you can personalize content and experiences for community members.

Self-Service: To alleviate pressure on your support teams why not implement a self-service community for users to access information to troubleshoot their issues?

Customer Support: Create a customer support portal for users to log tickets and track their support requests.

Analytics and Insights: The cloud includes analytics reporting tools so you can track community engagement, gain insight into community behavior, and monitor metrics.

Community Cloud Salesforce Drawbacks

While the Salesforce Community Cloud offers a number of benefits there are some drawbacks to consider.

Learning Curve: The Experience Cloud is a complex tool and can require a steep learning curve, especially for those who are new to Salesforce.

Customization: While there are a range of customization options on offer there are limitations when it comes to designing your portal if you require complex specifications.

Cost: The Experience Cloud can be quite costly when taking licenses, maintenance, and customization into account.

Security: Configuring security measures can be a complex process and any configuration mishaps could result in a data breach.

Mobile Responsiveness: Salesforce is constantly improving mobile responsiveness but additional customization and development might be needed to ensure users have a seamless mobile experience.

Performance issues: The more customization your communities require can impact the performance of that community. It’s important to take customizations, number of users, and data volume into account.

Scalability: The Experience Cloud is designed to grow as your business and user base do but this can incur additional costs when it comes to updating your infrastructure and licenses.

Limited Features: There are a number of features included with the Experience Cloud but special functionality might require the use of further development or use of third-party apps.

Offline Access: The Experience Cloud mostly operates online which means your users cannot access information or perform tasks if they are offline.

The Salesforce Experience Cloud tool is versatile and can be used throughout various industries to improve internal communication, collaboration, and information sharing.

Experience Cloud vs Community Cloud: Head-to-Head Comparison

These two Salesforce Clouds have different purposes for engaging with customers. Let’s take a look at their differences in the table below: 

Titan: Native Integration with the Experience Cloud Salesforce

If you are looking to extend the Experience Cloud, Titan is a great option to consider. You can build personalized portals and websites for your employees, customers, and partners with no coding knowledge required as the Titan Salesforce experience builder uses a drag-and-drop interface. Titan’s websites and portals work with live push and pull of Salesforce data to ensure your data is consistent and remains up to date. You can tailor the look and feel of your Experience Cloud site to match your business brand using Titan’s wide variety of customization options.

FAQs

Is Salesforce Community Cloud same as Experience Cloud?

The Salesforce Community Cloud was renamed to the Salesforce Experience Cloud. To answer your question “Is Community Cloud and Experience Cloud same?”, yes the product was renamed as the community platform allows you to do so much more than simply create communities. The Experience Cloud allows you to create and manage communities effectively.

What is the difference between Community Cloud and Service Cloud in Salesforce?

The Sales Cloud is used for managing the sales process, The Salesforce Community Cloud is used for creating an online community, and the Service Could is used for supporting the customer service experience. Marketing Cloud is used for the management and automation of marketing campaigns.

Salesforce Sites vs Experience Cloud: What is the difference between Salesforce Sites and Experience Cloud?

The difference between Salesforce Sites and Experience Cloud is that Experience implements a WYSIWYG-type editor while Sites exposes Apex and Visualforce directly.

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.

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.