Understand Salesforce Community License types

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a powerful feature to build community sites for multiple different use cases. It can be used for building website for partners, customers, Employee, External Applications etc. For each of this experience site requires a specific community license. For example to create a partner community site, you would need one partner community license. In this article, we will cover different types of Salesforce Community License and their purpose and how to use them for best managing community licenses.

There are two community license types for any community license which can be assigned:

• Member Based License
• Login Based License

Member Based License

Member based license is a general user license which is associated to a community user and provides them capability to access community site. User can access community site as many times as they want or not at all. In either case, user will consume the license and cost associate with it.

Here are the different member licenses for different community licenses:

• Customer Community
• Customer Community Plus
• Partner Community
• External Apps
• Channel Account

Login Based License

This is a unique type of license which is different than Member based license and associated with how users login to community site. In a simple words you pay for unique logins to your community site and not for each user registered on site. Let us take an example to undertsand how it works:

For example if you have 1000 users who need to be registered on your community site with ‘Login Based License’ type. Assuming you have purchased 200 login based licenses. 200 login based license will provide you following :

• 200 * 20 = 4000 user licenses
• 200 unique logins per month

Since you receive 4000 user licenses, you will be able to register 1000 community users for your site. Salesforce is not going to charge you 1000 licenses instead it will check for combined daily unique logins for all 1000 users per month which is in this case shouldn’t exceed 200 unique logins per month.

Total Daily Unique Logins vs Total Logins

Let’s understand what do i mean by Daily Unique Logins. Let’s take some login use cases to explain the math here:

• Out of 1000 users registered 800 users not logging in. 200 users logs in once a month.
  • Total login count = 800 * 0 + 200*1 = 200
  • Total Daily unique login count = 800 * 0 + 200*1 = 200

In this case both total login count and Daily unique login counts are same. Let’s take another login scenario to understand it better:

• Out of 1000 users registered 800 users not logging in. 200 users logs in five times in a day for a month.
  • Total login count for a month= 800*0 + 200*5 =1800
  • Total Daily unique login count = 800 * 0 + 200*1 = 200

As you in the second scenario Total login count for month increased significantly but Total Daily unique login counts remains 200. It is because Total logins is accounting for all login events but Total Daily login accounts 1 unique login per user per day even though user logged in 5 times in a day.

Anything beyond 200 unique logins will be counted as additional usage and your account executive reach out to you for additional charges.

Here are the different Login based licenses available for different community licenses:

• Customer Community Login
• Customer Community Plus Login
• Partner Community Login
• External Apps Login
• Channel Account Login

How to decide which license type to use?

It is important to understand how these license type to be used for effectively managing community license cost. You need to perform certain user login data analytics to make an informed decision. Here are few thing to consider which could help you decide :-

• If you have huge user base which needs access to portal but they are not expected to login often, you should consider using Login based license type.
• If you have small user base which you expect to login often than consider member based license type.
• If you have mixed user base where you have large number of users are not expected to login frequently and small number of users who needs access all the time, you could consider using both license types.