Salesforce Experience Cloud guide
A practical guide to Experience Cloud, formerly Community Cloud: portals, help centres and partner sites built on your Salesforce data.
Experience Cloud is Salesforce's product for building websites and portals on top of your Salesforce data: customer help centres, account portals, partner portals and member sites. It was formerly called Community Cloud. Experience Cloud is still the name in Salesforce Help and developer documentation, including the Winter '27 developer guide (version 68.0).
A note on how Salesforce markets it now
Salesforce's old Experience Cloud marketing page now leads to an "Agentic Self-Service" page about the Help Agent ("Casey"), a "Service Portal" and "Portal Experience Builder". In other words, much of the portal story is now sold as part of Service Cloud self-service. The product name in documentation has not changed, so check with Salesforce how it is packaged for your use case.
What it is for
Experience Cloud lets people outside your organisation see and update the right Salesforce records: customers checking cases, partners registering deals or members updating details. Because the site runs on the same platform, you avoid copying data into a separate web system.
Core capabilities
Experience Cloud capabilities
| Capability | What it does | Status per Salesforce |
|---|---|---|
| Experience Builder | Point-and-click site building | Core |
| LWR sites and templates | Fast sites on Lightning Web Runtime | Core |
| Lightning dashboards in LWR sites | Embed dashboards in sites | Beta (Winter '27) |
| Lightning reports in LWR sites | Embed reports in sites | Listed in the Winter '27 Beta section |
| Guest User Sharing Rule Access Report | Review what unauthenticated visitors can access | Winter '27 |
How it connects with other Salesforce products
- Service Cloud supplies cases, knowledge and the Help Agent for self-service.
- Sales Cloud supports partner portals for deal registration and shared pipeline.
- Lightning Web Components extend sites with custom functionality.
- Marketing Cloud can power preference pages; see our self-service preference centre blueprint.
Who it suits
Organisations that want customers, partners or members to self-serve against live Salesforce data. Our public sector and education pages show typical portal scenarios.
Planning an implementation
- Audience and purpose. Be specific: who logs in, and which three tasks must they complete?
- Sharing and security model. Design external access, sharing rules and guest access before building pages.
- Licences. Confirm external user licence types with Salesforce for each audience.
- Template and build approach. Choose an LWR template and decide where custom components are needed.
- Content ownership. Agree who maintains pages and knowledge after launch.
Common mistakes
- Opening guest access too widely and exposing records unintentionally.
- Building a portal nobody asked for instead of fixing the top customer tasks.
- Heavy customisation where standard components would do.
- Skipping performance and accessibility testing.
How GeekMidst can help
Our Experience Cloud development work covers site design, sharing models and custom components. We build bespoke features with Lightning Web Components and connect portals to service processes through Service Cloud implementation.
Questions we hear
Is Experience Cloud the same as Community Cloud?
Has Experience Cloud been discontinued?
Can we show dashboards in a portal?
How do we check guest user access?
Related reading
Service Cloud guide
Cases, knowledge and Help Agent
→Self-service preference centre
Letting customers manage preferences
→Lightning Web Components data patterns
Building reliable components
→Security and data handling
How we approach data security
→Sources
Planning a portal?
Tell us who needs access and what they need to do, and we will help you design a secure Experience Cloud site.
