Guide to Salesforce Community Licenses (Experience Cloud) for ISVs

When selecting the right Salesforce community licenses (Experience Cloud) for your ISV app or solution, there are various key parameters you’ll need to consider. In this Tech Experts post, we’ll walk through these parameters, as well as provide a cheat sheet to serve as a hand and quick summary guide.

What are Communities/Experiences?

Experiences or Communities are branded spaces for customers, partners, and employees to connect. As an ISV, you can build solutions and apps that enable your customers to create communities that provide better service to their end-users. You can help your customers connect to their external channel partners, agents, or brokers to collaborate effectively and accelerate deals. You can also empower your customer’s employees to connect and collaborate on a common portal.

Experiences are built right on top of the Salesforce platform which allows you to connect any third-party system or data directly into the community. Experiences provide the flexibility to easily create branded and customized communities for whatever use case your business demands.

What are the different types of Community licenses?

Security and access are key aspects of any Salesforce product and Communities are no exception. User access to a community is provided via special community user licenses. Below is a list of all the available license options:

  1. Commerce Portals (External Apps also previously called Lightning External Apps Starter)
    Custom digital experiences to engage any external stakeholder, including brand engagement and customer loyalty. Limited access to CRM objects.
  2. Customer Community
    Business-to-consumer experiences with large numbers of external users who need access to the case object and/or Salesforce Knowledge.
  3. Customer Community Plus
    Business-to-consumer experiences with external users who need access to reports & dashboards and may need advanced sharing.
  4. Partner Community
    Business-to-business communities that need access to sales data such as partner relationship management.
  5. External Apps (previously called Lightning External Apps Plus)
    Highly customized experiences incorporating CRM objects, custom objects, external data, and extra storage. Ideal use cases are dealer, vendor, or supplier portals. Also commonly used for franchise management, marketplaces, and multi-level marketing.
  6. Lightning Platform Starter/Plus
    Extend the power of CRM to every business process, every app, and every employee to build engaging employee communities and concierge sites.
  7. Purpose-built cross-product community licenses
    These are the community licenses that allow external users to access other Salesforce products/functionality namely Tableau CRM and various Industry solutions.

Which license is right for me?

You could review the Communities User Licenses documentation to understand which license works best for you, but as an ISV you have to consider some additional factors.

1. ISV Program Type (ISVForce vs OEM)

ISVForce: If you are an ISVForce partner, you can build your app to work with any of the community licenses.

OEM: If you are an OEM partner, there are some restrictions on which community licenses you can leverage. Currently, for all new contracts, OEM partners can re-sell only Commerce Portals, Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, Partner Community*, and Tableau CRM for Communities license subscriptions. Reach out to your Partner Account Manager if you have questions.

Note:
1. OEM re-sell community license subscriptions have some contractual restrictions. It prohibits Create, Read, Update, and Delete on Leads, Opportunities, Cases, Solutions, and Campaigns.
2. *Partner Community for OEM is for restricted use only. Reach out to your PAM if you need to find out more.

2. Are your community’s members employees OR customers/partners?

Are your community users going to be internal users or external users? Internal users are employees of your company. External users are non-employees, such as customers, partners, or third-party vendors and contractors.

If your target audience is internal employees, then Lightning Platform Starter or Lightning Platform Starter Plus is the right license if you are an ISVforce partner. Please note that these are not available for OEMs. If you are an OEM and want to provide an employee community experience, you can leverage your OEM embedded platform license to allow employee users to log in to a community.

3. External Users

Are your external community users partners or customers? If they’re partners, for example, resellers or channel sales teams, then Partner Community or External Apps are likely the best fit for them.

Customers are users who use your product or service. They often need to access information and get their questions answered. Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, and Commerce Portals are the ideal licenses for such users.

4. Available functionality

Let’s break down our analysis into four parts based on increasing functionality and price points.

Commerce Portals vs. Customer Community and Customer Community Plus
These licenses are on the lower end of the functionality available and the price.

The questions below will help you choose between Commerce Portals and Customer Community/Customer Community Plus:
a. Do your customers need access to the standard Case object to log cases?
b. Do your customers need read, create, and delete access to Knowledge for self-service and learning?
c. You don’t need extra platform capacity like API calls, Data storage, and File storage.

If the answer to any of the above is YES, then Customer Community or Customer Community Plus licenses are the right fit. It is also recommended you go over the comparison table of the license capabilities to understand what these licenses do not provide. Please note that the OEM versions of the customer community license will not have access to Cases.

Commerce Portals is a good fit if your use case uses only custom objects and does not fit into either a self-service customer community or a partner relationship use case. The one advantage of Lightning External App Starter (Commerce Portals) is that it comes with additional platform capacities like API calls, Data storage, and File storage. The one disadvantage of this license over Customer Community is that Commerce Portals only come with read-only access to Knowledge.
Note: OEM partners have a benefit available to them through which they can distribute up to 100 free Commerce Portal licenses to each of their OEM customers to kick-start their experience cloud use-case.

Customer Community vs. Customer Community Plus
If you are considering Customer Community licenses, they are further broken down into Customer Community and Customer Community Plus where the Plus gives you more capabilities but usually at a higher price than Customer Community.

The questions below will help you choose between Lightning External Apps and Customer Community:
a. Do your users need access to Reports and Dashboards?
b. Do your users need access to Tableau CRM?
c. Will your users need roles, sharing rules, and other advanced sharing features?
d. Do you need access to Calendars and Events?
e. Do you need access to CRM content?

If the answer to any of the above is YES, then Customer Community Plus is the right license. Of course, if the ISV solution has user personas that fit both the customer community and the customer community plus, the org can have a mix of both licenses.

Customer Community Plus vs. Partner Community
Partner Community is the right license over Customer Community Plus if your users require access to objects like Leads, Opportunities, Campaigns, and Quotes.

Partner Community vs. External Apps
The only difference between these two is that External Apps come with additional API calls, data storage, and file storage.

5. User Volume Scale

The number of users is also an important factor in deciding which license type to select.

Commerce Portals and Customer Community can scale up to 10 million users, while Customer Community Plus, Partner Community, and External Apps each scale to 2 million users.

The Customer Community Plus, Partner Community, and External Apps users have roles and sharing, which increase the complexity and thus support a lower volume of users. With the Spring ’18 feature of Account Role Optimization, the Customer Community Plus and Partner Community can scale for more than 2 Million users. This feature needs to be enabled by the support and requires Product team approval on a case-by-case basis.

6. User Access Frequency (Member vs. Login)

Now, we understand that you can have external types of users who have different reasons for accessing a community. For example, financial institutions may have users who have bank accounts and who log in frequently to manage their accounts. On the other hand, some users may have loans, for example, and login only once or twice a month on average to check their balance. Community licenses support two models to accommodate this use case: member licenses and login licenses.

Member licenses are meant for active users who log in frequently to the community. Login licenses, however, are meant for users who log in less frequently, usually 3 or fewer times per month. External users associated with the login license consume one login each time they sign in to a community. However, logging in multiple times during the same day still only consumes a single login and, once logged in, switching between communities in the org doesn’t consume extra logins. The ratio between the number of monthly logins you purchase and the number of login licenses that are provisioned in your org is 1 to 20.

Let’s take an example. If you re-sell and provide 100 member licenses, that enables 100 members who can use that license to access the community. If you re-sell and provide 100 monthly logins, then 2,000 login licenses are provisioned in your org to ensure you have enough licenses to assign to all the login-based users you may potentially create. The login pricing is usually less than the member pricing.

Tableau CRM Access for Community Users

When it comes to providing external community users access to the Tableau CRM functionality, there are a couple of options.

  1. Tableau CRM for Communities (Members)
  2. Tableau CRM for Communities (Logins)

These are add-on licenses that will only work in conjunction with Customer Community+ or Partner Community licenses.
Note: The Tableau CRM for Communities licenses is also available for OEMs.

How do Community Licenses work in License Management App (LMA) and Channel Order App (COA)?

If you are an OEM reselling community license subscriptions, you will have a product catalog listing your particular community licenses, which are priced on a per-user per-month basis. For member licenses, each order corresponds to a single community member user who can log in as many times as they require. For login-based members, however, each unit corresponds to a login per month.

Let’s go back to the example we used for the member vs login conversation. If you re-sell and provide 100 member licenses, you will submit an order for 100 community member licenses. If you re-sell and provide 100 logins per month (which provides 2000 login licenses) to the community, you will submit a COA order for 100 logins.

In the LMA you have to assign a number of licensed seats that would allow your customers to add user access to your package. For a member-based community license, you will add a seat for each licensed user to whom you want to provide access. For login-based community licenses, however, you have to add a seat for each login, rather than for each user.

Going back to our example, we will provide 100 seats for 100 member-based licenses and provide 100 seats for the 100 logins in LMA.

Cheat Sheet

As promised, here is a handy Cheat Sheet that summarizes the purpose of each license, which ones are available for OEM partners, the key differences between the license types, considerations for provisioning licenses with the LMA, and ordering licenses from Salesforce with the COA.

Summary

There are a lot of options for community licenses. If you have analyzed all the parameters mentioned here, you should have a very good idea of which licenses fit your use case and solution. The best part about community licenses is that you can have a mix of all kinds of licenses in your org, which is a great way to scale and meet your customer’s requirements as their business expands.

Resources

Salesforce Communities Overview
Setup and Manage Salesforce Communities
Trailheads
Partner Community Chatter Group
AppExchange & ISV Technical Enablement Chatter Group
Cheat Sheet

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Hemant Jawale
AppExchange and the Salesforce Ecosystem

ISV Technical Evangelist at Salesforce. Working with FinTech Salesforce Partners. Technologist and a Photographer