A Salesforce customer portal is a secure, branded website, built on Experience Cloud, where your customers log in to open and track cases, search knowledge articles, and view or update their own account data straight from your Salesforce org. The original "Customer Portal" feature closed to new orgs in Summer '13; every new portal today is an Experience Cloud site.
This guide was first published in October 2020. It has been rewritten for November 2026: the legacy setup steps are replaced with current Experience Cloud ones, and it now covers template and license choices, the difference between customer and partner portals, and adding an Agentforce agent to the portal.
What is a Salesforce customer portal?
It is a logged-in Experience Cloud site that shows customers a controlled slice of your CRM. Trailhead describes Experience Cloud as a branded digital experience connected to your CRM that people may call a portal, help forum or support site, and lists customer service and account portals alongside partner portals as typical uses (Trailhead: Experience Cloud basics).
Because the portal runs on the same platform as Service Cloud and Sales Cloud, there is no data sync to build: a case a customer logs in the portal is the same case record your service team works in the console. What each customer can see is controlled by the same profiles, permission sets and sharing settings you use internally. For the wider product, including LWR vs Aura, prices and other site types, see our Salesforce Experience Cloud guide.
What happened to the old Salesforce Customer Portal?
Salesforce stopped offering it to new orgs in Summer '13 and pointed customers to Experience Cloud sites instead. The Salesforce Partner Portal Guide states that "Starting in Summer '13, the partner portal is no longer available for orgs that aren't currently using it," that existing orgs keep full access, and that orgs without one should try Experience Cloud sites (Salesforce Partner Portal Guide). The Customer Portal Implementation Guide says the same of the Customer Portal.
So if an older article tells you to open Customer Portal Settings and click Enable Customer Portal, it describes a feature you will not find in a new org. If your org still runs a legacy portal, plan a move to an Experience Cloud site: the contacts, accounts and cases stay where they are, but the site, licenses, profiles and sharing need to be rebuilt and tested.
What can customers do in a Salesforce customer portal?
The core jobs have not changed since 2020, but the tools around them have:
- Get help without waiting. Search knowledge articles and, increasingly, ask an AI agent. Salesforce's customer portal page describes "a single prompt bar for search and chat that's powered by Agentforce" (Salesforce: customer portal software).
- Open and track cases. Customers submit requests, add files and comments, and see status updates without emailing your team.
- Manage their account. The Customer Account Portal template gives customers a private, secure place to view and update their account information, with knowledge search and cases built in.
- Use it on a phone. Salesforce's Mobile Publisher turns the portal into an iOS and Android app with notifications and persistent login.
- Do industry-specific tasks. Patients booking appointments, policyholders filing claims or dealers placing orders, using custom objects and flows on the same site.
Which Experience Cloud template should you use?
Start from the template closest to your main use case; you can add pages and components later. Salesforce's developer guide Which Experience Builder Template Do I Use? describes the options:
| Template | Best for | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Customer Service | Self-service support portals | Built around knowledge, questions and case submission |
| Customer Account Portal | Logged-in account self-service | A private, secure place to view and update account information; supports Knowledge, Chatter Questions and cases |
| Help Center | Public help sites | Exposes knowledge articles without login; often paired with a chat agent |
| Partner Central | Partner portals | Channel sales: shared training materials and sales collateral, plus reports to track pipeline |
| Build Your Own (LWR) | Custom, high-performance portals | Based on Lightning Web Runtime; works with Lightning web components only, not Aura components |
The Aura-based templates (Customer Service, Customer Account Portal) give administrators more ready-made components. Build Your Own (LWR) starts with fewer features and needs more development work, so it suits teams with Lightning web component skills or a design that the standard templates cannot match.
Which license do customer portal users need?
Every portal user needs an Experience Cloud user license, and the license decides what data they can reach. Salesforce Help's Experience Cloud User Licenses page lists Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, Partner Community, External Apps, External Identity and Channel Account. The three most used for portals compare like this:
| Customer Community | Customer Community Plus | Partner Community | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical portal | High-volume B2C self-service | B2B customer accounts | Resellers, distributors, brokers |
| Record access | Sharing sets (no sharing rules) | Roles and sharing rules | Roles, sharing rules and the full sharing model |
| Reports and dashboards | No | Yes | Yes |
| Leads, opportunities, campaigns, quotes | No | No | Yes |
Each license comes per member (a fixed monthly fee per user) or per login (paid each time a user logs in). Per-login suits customers who visit a few times a year; per-member suits users who log in often. As one published example, on 11 Nov 2026 Salesforce's customer portal page listed Service Portal Login at $4 per login and Service Portal Member at $10 per member (USD, marked as subject to change), and its Service Cloud pricing page lists a Self-Service Help Center in the Core edition, with an authenticated portal available for purchase. Prices vary by region and contract, so confirm yours with your Salesforce account executive.
Choosing the lowest license and upgrading later is the expensive route: moving users between license types means re-checking profiles and sharing for every user. Decide what customers must see before you buy.
Customer portal vs partner portal: what is the difference?
Both are Experience Cloud sites; they differ in who uses them and which data they open. The 2020 version of this article drew the same line, and it still holds.
| Customer portal | Partner portal | |
|---|---|---|
| Users | End customers, patients, policyholders, account contacts | Resellers, distributors, dealers, brokers |
| Main purpose | Self-service support and account management | Selling together: leads, deals, shared sales content |
| Key objects | Cases, knowledge, orders, invoices, assets | Leads, opportunities, quotes, campaigns, deal registrations |
| Usual template | Customer Service or Customer Account Portal | Partner Central |
| License | Customer Community or Customer Community Plus | Partner Community |
Many companies run both, often from one org: a customer site and a partner site, each with its own members, branding and data access.
How do you set up a customer portal in Salesforce?
You enable digital experiences, create a site from a template, prepare profiles, turn contacts into portal users and publish. These steps follow Trailhead's Create Customer Account Portal project; do them in a sandbox first.
- Enable digital experiences. In Setup, enter Digital Experiences in Quick Find, select Settings, check Enable Digital Experiences and save. Choose the domain name carefully: Trailhead warns that you can't change it after you enable digital experiences (Trailhead).
- Create the site. In Setup, open Digital Experiences, All Sites, click New, pick a template (for example Customer Account Portal), name the site and set its URL ending. The site starts in Preview status, so nothing is public yet.
- Give your admin user a role. Trailhead has you assign a role to your own user before you create customer users, because the owner of the customer's account needs a place in the role hierarchy.
- Prepare external profiles. Clone the standard Customer Community User profile for your own use, or enable "Allow using standard external profiles for self-registration and user creation" in Digital Experiences Settings. Our guide to profiles in Salesforce explains what each setting controls.
- Turn contacts into portal users. Open a contact that belongs to an account, choose Enable Customer User, set the email, a unique username, the user license and the profile, and save. For many users, use self-registration or a data load instead of doing it one at a time.
- Add members to the site. In the site's Workspaces, open Administration, then Members, and add the external profiles or permission sets that may log in.
- Set up record access. Use sharing sets for Customer Community users, or roles and sharing rules for Customer Community Plus and Partner Community users, then log in as a test customer and check they see only their own account's records.
- Brand and build pages. In Experience Builder, apply your theme, add components for cases, knowledge and account data, and set the login page. For login with Google or a corporate identity provider, see our Salesforce SSO guide.
- Publish and activate. Publish the site in Experience Builder, then activate it in Workspaces, Administration. If welcome emails are turned on for the site, activation sends them to members, so check the email settings and templates first.
How do you add an Agentforce agent to the portal?
You connect the agent to a messaging channel and place that channel on the site. Trailhead's Agentforce deployment unit sets it up like this:
- Create an Enhanced Chat channel. In Messaging Settings, create a new channel of type Enhanced Chat for the web and route it through an Omni-Channel flow (with a fallback queue) to your Agentforce Service Agent.
- Configure the embedded service deployment. The channel creates one; edit its pre-chat form to collect details such as name and email, then publish it.
- Add the chat to the site. In Experience Builder, drop the Embedded Messaging component onto the site, for example in the footer, and publish.
- Allow the site domain in CORS. Add the site's domain, with https://, to the CORS allowed origins. Trailhead warns that without this the chat window won't load and there's no obvious error.
- Test escalation. Confirm the agent answers from knowledge and, when no service rep is available, offers to create a case; then check that the case exists in Salesforce.
The agent is only as good as the knowledge and data behind it, so clean up articles and decide what the agent may do (look up an order, update an address, open a case) before launch. Our Salesforce chatbot guide compares Agentforce with other bot options, and the Service Cloud guide covers the case and knowledge setup the portal relies on.
What mistakes should you avoid when building a customer portal?
- Opening too much data. External users can see more than you expect if organization-wide defaults are loose. Set external sharing defaults to Private and test as real customer users before launch.
- Buying the wrong license. If customers will need reports or partners will need opportunities later, the basic license will not stretch. Map the next two years of use cases first.
- Contacts without accounts. Portal users are created from contacts on an account. Clean duplicate and orphan contacts before you enable users.
- Weak knowledge. Self-service and AI answers fail when articles are out of date. Assign owners and review dates to articles.
- Skipping the welcome emails. If welcome emails are on, activation sends them to members. Customize them and decide who gets access at launch.
- No owner after launch. Portals need someone to watch login trends, case deflection and search terms with no results, and to keep improving pages.
How can Techila help you build a customer portal?
Techila is a Salesforce Summit Partner headquartered in Frisco, Texas. Our Experience Cloud services team designs and builds customer and partner portals, from license and sharing design to Experience Builder pages, single sign-on and Agentforce agents, with architect-led delivery and testing in a sandbox first. Talk to a Salesforce architect about your portal.
Frequently asked questions
Does Salesforce have a customer portal?
Yes. Salesforce customer portals are built as Experience Cloud sites: branded, logged-in websites connected to your Salesforce org where customers open and track cases, search knowledge articles and view their own account data. The original Customer Portal feature has not been available to new orgs since Summer '13.
What replaced the Salesforce Customer Portal?
Experience Cloud, formerly called Community Cloud. Salesforce's own portal guides say the legacy Customer Portal and partner portal are not available to new orgs from Summer '13, that existing orgs keep access, and that orgs should use Experience Cloud sites to share records with customers and partners.
Which license do customer portal users need?
Most business-to-consumer portals use the Customer Community license, which supports sharing sets for high volumes of users. Choose Customer Community Plus when customers need roles, reports and dashboards, and Partner Community when external users must work leads, opportunities, campaigns or quotes. Each license is sold per member or per login.
How do I give a customer access to the portal?
Open the customer's contact record, which must belong to an account, and choose Enable Customer User. Pick the user license and an external profile, then save. The profile must also be added to the site under Workspaces, Administration, Members, or the user cannot log in to that site.
Can I add an AI agent to a Salesforce customer portal?
Yes. You connect an Agentforce Service Agent to an Enhanced Chat messaging channel, publish its embedded service deployment, drop the Embedded Messaging component onto the site in Experience Builder and add the site domain to the CORS allowlist. The agent can then answer questions and, when no service rep is available, offer to create a case.
What is the difference between a customer portal and a partner portal?
A customer portal serves end customers: support cases, knowledge, orders, invoices and account details. A partner portal serves resellers and distributors: leads, deal registration, opportunities and shared sales content. Partner portals need the Partner Community license, which opens sales objects such as leads, opportunities and quotes.