Choose Community user License Part 1 – External Licenses

Community Licenses are a special type of Licenses. Choosing right type of community license for external and internal community users is very important for any community project. Purchasing Community Cloud licenses allow members to log in or give access to Salesforce objects based on the business needs. However, because of so many type of licenses readers sometimes get confused. Therefore, in this article I will discuss external community licenses in depth so that you have a clear understanding of community licenses.

In this article I will discuss

• Why you need community licenses
• Member-Based Licenses
• External Licenses
• Type of External Licenses

Why you need community licenses?

One point to understand here is that even without getting community licenses members can have some level of access. For example, guest users can access publicly available community pages i.e. public knowledge base to read content, review knowledge articles, and perform tasks which do not require them to log in.

Then why you need community license anyway? Purchasing a community license also allows you to create external profiles (beyond the guest user profile) to access your communities.

Each community license come in two flavors

• Member-based license
• Login-based license

Member Based License: A Community member-based license works like a standard Salesforce internal license: This license is further categorized into External and Internal license

External License : These licenses are those provided to users that are outside your organization. External users with a member-based license are able to access a community as many times as they want. External licenses are for partner and customer community.

There are five types of external licenses:

• Customer Community
• Customer Community Plus
• Partner Community
• Lightning External Apps Starter
• Lightning External Apps Plus.

Internal License: These licenses are provided to users that are part of the organization. Internal licenses are for employee community.

There are two types of internal licenses (Will be discussed in later article)

• Lightning Platform Starter
• Lightning Platform Starter Plus

Here we have to remember that we cannot mix internal and external licenses. i.e. purchasing and using internal licenses for external users has high security risks. External users do not have access to the internal org.

Don’t worry if you are getting confused. I will discuss each license in detail.

External License:

External user licenses are targeted at people outside your company, such as partners or customers. Lets discuss external licenses type in more detail.

Customer Community License

This license gives B2C (Business-to-consumer) experiences with huge numbers of external users who need access to case objects and/or knowledge.

It is best suited for High Volume Customer Portal, Service Cloud Portal, Authenticated Sites Portal

You can consider example of knowledge base where customers can find information they need. Additionally, they can ask questions from other members of the community.

Another example will be of customer portals where customers can login to pay bill of credit card

Customer Community Plus

This license is good for B2C (business-to-consumer) communities which focus on customer support and don’t involve sales scenarios.

Benefit of this type of license include:

• Access to Reports and dashboards
• Delegated admin: Delegated members of community who can create and do simple troubleshooting for other users
• Content libraries
• Role based sharing
• Additional Storage: 2MB per member (for member-based licenses), 1MB per monthly login (for login-based licenses)

Partner Community License

It is highest or you can say “premium” license which is great for B2B (Business-to-Business) cases, where company can sell through distribution channel. These communities need access to sales data.

This license grant access to Salesforce objects like leads, opportunities, campaigns etc.

This license can be used in variety of cases like partner relationship management, broker portals, dealer sites or B2B commerce.

Understanding three types of external license might be little tricky at first. I will simplify it for you. Imagine you community as a big apartment. With 1 Bedroom, 2 Bedroom and 3 Bedroom Flats. Depending on the amount the customer pays he gets that kind of flat. Similarly, community user gets different level of access depending on the license he has.

Customer Community License has basic access, just like 1 bedroom flat. Customer Community Plus License get more more access, like the customer getting 2 bedroom flat. Partner community license gets the most access, just like customer getting 3 bedroom flat. Though the community users are part of same community but they have different access level, similar to customers who are part of same apartment but have access to different kind of flat.

Note: One community can have different licenses giving individual members different experience.

There are two more types of external licenses:

Lightning External Apps Starter

This license is used for Custom digital experiences to engage any external stakeholder, including Brand Engagement and Customer Loyalty. This license has limited access to CRM objects.

It is a good fit if your use case needs only custom objects and does not fit into either a self-service customer community or a partner relationship use case.

Advantage of Lightning External App Starter is that it comes with additional platform capacities like API calls, Data storage, and File storage.

Disadvantage of this license over Customer Community is that External App only comes with read-only access to Knowledge.

Lightning External App Plus

This license provides highly customized experiences incorporating CRM objects, custom objects, external data. It comes with additional API calls, data storage, and file storage.

Ideal use cases for this type of license are dealer, vendor, or supplier portals. Also commonly used for franchise management, marketplaces, and multi-level marketing.

The table below will give you further clarity:

Best License for customer Community

Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, and Lightning External App Starter are the ideal licenses for such users. These licenses are on the lower end of the functionality available and the price.

Best License for partner Community

Partner Community License or Lightning External App Plus licenses are likely the best fit for partner community.

Points to remember

• Communities licenses are associated with users, not a specific community. Same users can be member of multiple communities
• Communities can have different users with different license types associated to it.
• Even without communities’ licenses, external users have some access to your communities.
•  Customer, Customer Community Plus, and Lightning External Apps Starter licenses require unique usernames within the Salesforce org that a community belongs to.
• Partner Community licenses, Employee Community, Lightning External Apps Plus licenses require unique usernames across all Salesforce orgs that the user belongs to.
• Users who have portal licenses can access your community as long as you include them by adding the profiles or permission sets that they’re associated with to your community. You don’t have to purchase new Communities licenses for them.
• In Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited orgs, you can create up to 100 communities without buying communities licenses. Active, inactive, and preview communities, including Lightning Platform sites, count against this limit. However, to create communities using the Partner Central template, you must purchase at least one Partner Community license.

Conclusion

Now that you have clear idea about community licenses, you can share information with community members in a safe way. You can now easily make decision on what type of license to purchase.

Reference

Sharing CRM Data in a Portal or Community

Communities and Community Users in Your Salesforce Org

Salesforce Communities Licenses

Communities User Licenses