Salesforce Experience Cloud, formerly Community Cloud, is the Salesforce product for building branded portals, help centers and websites on top of your CRM data. Customers, partners and employees sign in, see only the records they are allowed to see, and solve problems themselves. In 2026 it also hosts Agentforce agents, so a portal can answer questions and complete tasks.
This guide first appeared in 2021 as "What are the Benefits of the Salesforce Community Cloud?". The product has been renamed and rebuilt since then, so we rewrote it for November 2026 with current names, templates, licenses and list prices, all checked against Salesforce's own pages.
What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?
Experience Cloud is a digital experience platform built on the Salesforce Platform. Trailhead describes an Experience Cloud site as a branded digital experience connected to your CRM. Because the site reads and writes the same records your teams use, a customer who logs a case in the portal creates a real case in Service Cloud, and a partner who registers a deal creates a real record in Sales Cloud.
The name changed in two steps. Salesforce's Digital 360 announcement on 23 September 2020 introduced Experience Cloud as "formerly known as Community Cloud", and the Spring '21 release note "Hello Experience Cloud, Farewell Community Cloud" changed the labels inside Salesforce. Since then a portal or forum is called a site rather than a community, and the Setup menu is called Digital Experiences.
What can you build with Experience Cloud?
Most Experience Cloud projects fall into four types. The audience decides the license, and the license decides what data and sharing the site can use.
| Site type | Audience | Typical tasks |
|---|---|---|
| Customer self-service portal or help center | Customers, often in high volume | Search knowledge articles, log and track cases, chat with an agent, book appointments |
| Customer account portal | Customers with an ongoing relationship | View orders, invoices, applications, policies or assets; update details; upload documents |
| Partner portal (PRM) | Resellers, distributors, dealers, brokers | Register deals, receive leads, track opportunities, access enablement content and market development funds |
| Microsite or branded site | Public visitors and members | Event pages, landing pages, product information, sign-up forms |
Employee sites are also possible, though many companies now use Slack or the Salesforce app for internal work and keep Experience Cloud for people outside the company.
What has changed since it was called Community Cloud?
Almost everything around the core idea has changed. The table compares the product our 2021 post described with what Salesforce sells in November 2026.
| Area | Community Cloud, 2021 | Experience Cloud, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Name of a portal | Community | Site, or Experience Cloud site |
| Main build technology | Aura templates | LWR templates (Build Your Own and Microsite) alongside Aura |
| Content | Salesforce CMS workspaces | Enhanced LWR sites and enhanced CMS workspaces on one platform, with partial deployment and site content search |
| Help in the portal | Knowledge search and live chat | Agentforce agents in the site, grounded in knowledge and Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) |
| Mobile | Mobile Publisher for Communities | Mobile Publisher, which turns a portal into an iOS and Android app |
| How Salesforce markets it | A cloud of its own | Mostly inside Service Cloud (Service Portal) and Partner Relationship Management |
The last row matters when you research it: Salesforce's current pages sell customer portals as part of Agentic Self-Service and partner portals as part of Partner Relationship Management, while the platform underneath, its templates and its documentation are still called Experience Cloud.
Should you build on LWR or Aura templates?
For most new sites, LWR is the better starting point. Salesforce's LWR Sites for Experience Cloud guide (Winter '27, updated 25 September 2026) says LWR sites "deliver unparalleled site performance and improve developer productivity", support custom URL paths without the /s segment, and are built only with Lightning Web Components. Since Winter '23, every new LWR site is an enhanced LWR site on the same platform as Salesforce CMS.
| LWR templates | Aura templates | |
|---|---|---|
| Templates | Build Your Own (LWR), Microsite (LWR) | Prebuilt templates such as Customer Service, Customer Account Portal and Partner Central, plus Build Your Own |
| Components | Lightning Web Components only | Aura and Lightning Web Components |
| URLs | Custom paths, no /s | Paths include /s |
| Publishing | Component changes go live when you publish | Component changes go live immediately |
| Missing pieces | No Chatter feeds, default themes, Lightning Bolt export or right-to-left languages in standard components | No LWR performance features such as publish-time freezing and HTTP caching |
| Best for | Fast, custom-branded portals and microsites built by developers | Feature-rich portals that rely on prebuilt pages and components |
The guide notes that Build Your Own (LWR) "is best suited for developers" comfortable with Lightning Web Components, Salesforce DX and Apex, and that LWR sites are available in Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited and Developer Editions. If your design depends on something on the LWR limitations list, Aura is still supported. See our Salesforce Lightning guide for background on the two component models.
Which Experience Cloud license do you need?
Choose the license by audience and by how much data and sharing the site needs. Salesforce Help's Experience Cloud User Licenses page describes the main types:
| License | Built for | Sharing model |
|---|---|---|
| Customer Community | High-volume business-to-consumer self-service with cases and knowledge | Sharing sets; no role hierarchy or sharing rules |
| Customer Community Plus | Customers who need reports, dashboards and more data access | Roles and sharing rules |
| Partner Community | Business-to-business channel sales, with leads and opportunities | Partner roles on a business account enabled as a partner account |
| External Apps | Custom experiences for any external audience, such as loyalty or brand sites | Limited access to CRM objects |
Two points cause the most rework. First, Salesforce notes that upgrading users to a license that requires a role cannot be reversed, so plan the sharing model before you buy. Second, the sharing model has to be tested with real external users: our guide to sharing rules in Salesforce explains how record access is built.
How much does Experience Cloud cost in 2026?
Salesforce publishes some Experience Cloud prices and quotes the rest. These are the list prices on its pages on 11 November 2026:
| Product | List price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Service Portal Login | $4 per login | Customer portal with chat and knowledge; unmetered Agentforce actions and Data 360 queries during a 24-hour login session |
| Service Portal Member | $10 per member | The same, with unlimited sessions per month |
| Partner Relationship Management | $25 per member per month, billed annually | Experience Cloud, deal management and channel analytics |
| Partner Ecosystem Management | $50 per member per month | Everything in PRM plus partner enablement, loyalty management and account plans |
Salesforce adds that some Service Cloud editions "already include Self-Service right out of the box", and that its pricing is for information only. Login licenses suit users who visit a few times a month; member licenses suit frequent users. Licenses are usually the smaller part of the cost: design, data model, sharing, integration and testing drive the budget. Our Salesforce implementation cost guide and edition comparison help you estimate the rest.
What are the benefits of Experience Cloud?
The benefits our 2021 post listed still hold, and most are stronger now because the site shares one data model with the rest of Salesforce.
- Self-service that removes work: customers find answers in knowledge articles, track their own cases and book appointments, so agents spend time on the cases that need a person. Our Service Cloud guide covers the service side.
- A faster partner channel: partners register deals, receive leads and see their pipeline in a portal that writes straight to Sales Cloud, so channel managers stop reconciling spreadsheets.
- One customer record: what a customer does in the portal sits next to what sales, service and marketing already know, so every team works from the same history.
- Control over who sees what: licenses, sharing sets, roles and guest user settings decide exactly which records each external user can reach.
- AI help inside the site: Agentforce agents can answer questions and complete tasks in the portal, grounded in your knowledge base and Data 360.
- Desktop and mobile from one build: sites are responsive, and Mobile Publisher can package a portal as an iOS and Android app.
- Predictable licensing: per-login and per-member pricing lets you match cost to how often each audience visits.
How do you add Agentforce to an Experience Cloud site?
Salesforce documents a standard path for putting a service agent on a site. In outline:
- Create an agent from a service agent template, give it the topics, actions and knowledge it needs, and create the Experience Cloud site if you do not have one.
- Make sure Digital Engagement is provisioned and the org uses Omni-Channel or Enhanced Chat, with a messaging channel that routes to the agent.
- In Agentforce Builder, open the Agent Readiness Checklist, go to Sites and deploy the agent to your site. Then confirm in Experience Builder that the Enhanced Chat component is on the page, and publish.
- Add the site's domain to the CORS allowlist. Trailhead warns that if you skip it, the chat window will not load, with no clear error.
- Test the agent with real customer questions and logged-in test users before launch, including what it does when it should hand over to a person.
Grounding decides how useful the agent is; our post on Data 360 for Agentforce grounding explains the options, and our Agentforce practice covers agent design and governance.
How do you implement Experience Cloud?
A portal project succeeds or fails on the data and sharing model, not the page design. For a customer portal in detail, see our step-by-step customer portal guide. A typical sequence:
- Define audiences and tasks. List who will sign in, what each group must do, and what they must never see.
- Choose licenses. Map each audience to a license, and decide between login and member pricing from expected visit frequency.
- Design the sharing model. Plan accounts, contacts, sharing sets or roles, and guest user access before building any pages.
- Pick the template. LWR for performance and custom branding, Aura when you need its prebuilt features.
- Set up identity. Configure login, self-registration and single sign-on; our guide to social sign-on in Salesforce covers one common option.
- Build and integrate. Create pages and components, connect external systems through APIs or MuleSoft, and load knowledge content.
- Test as external users. Log in as each persona in a Salesforce sandbox and check access, performance and accessibility.
- Launch and measure. Roll out to a pilot group, then track case deflection, partner deal registration and adoption.
What are the most common Experience Cloud mistakes?
- Opening too much to guest users. Public pages run as a guest user; review guest user sharing and object access on every release.
- Buying the wrong license. A license that cannot use roles, or a role-based upgrade that cannot be undone, is expensive to fix later.
- Treating the portal as a website project. The hard work is data, sharing and integration; budget for it.
- Launching without content. A self-service portal with thin knowledge articles sends customers straight back to the phone, and gives an AI agent nothing to work from.
How can Techila help with Experience Cloud?
Techila Global Services is a Salesforce Summit Partner headquartered in Frisco, Texas, with more than 350 Salesforce professionals and 500+ certifications across the US, India and APAC. Our architect-led Experience Cloud team designs licenses and sharing models, builds LWR and Aura sites, connects them to Service Cloud, Sales Cloud and outside systems, and adds Agentforce where it helps. Talk to us about your portal.
Frequently asked questions
Is Experience Cloud the same as Community Cloud?
Yes. Experience Cloud is the current name of Salesforce Community Cloud. Salesforce introduced the name with Digital 360 in September 2020, and the product labels in Salesforce changed with the Spring '21 release. Setup still calls the feature Digital Experiences, and each portal or forum is now called a site rather than a community.
What is Salesforce Experience Cloud used for?
Experience Cloud is used to build branded websites, portals and help centers that run on Salesforce data. Common examples are customer self-service portals, partner portals for channel sales, account portals where customers manage orders or applications, and employee sites. Users sign in and see only the records they are allowed to see.
How much does Salesforce Experience Cloud cost?
It depends on the license and the audience. On 11 November 2026 Salesforce listed its Service Portal at $4 per login or $10 per member, and Partner Relationship Management, which includes Experience Cloud, at $25 per member per month billed annually. Other license types are quoted by Salesforce sales.
Should I use LWR or Aura templates for a new Experience Cloud site?
For most new sites, start with LWR. Salesforce's Winter '27 LWR guide says LWR sites are built for performance and support clean URLs without /s. Aura templates still offer some prebuilt features LWR lacks, such as Chatter feeds and default themes, so check your requirements against Salesforce's LWR limitations list first.
Can Agentforce work on an Experience Cloud site?
Yes. Salesforce documents how to deploy an Agentforce service agent to an Experience Cloud site through Enhanced Chat and the Embedded Messaging component. Salesforce's Service Portal licenses also include unmetered Agentforce actions and Data 360 queries during a login session.