Salesforce Community Cloud pricing and licensing in 2026. Pay for external users by how often they log in.

Community Cloud is now Experience Cloud, and external users are still billed per member or per login. Choosing the model audience by audience, based on real login frequency, sets most of the bill.

What is Salesforce community licensing in 2026?

Community licensing is how Salesforce charges for external users: customers checking an order, partners submitting a deal, citizens filing a form. These people sign in to a site you run on Experience Cloud. Their licenses cost less than a full CRM seat, but they are not free.

The license type controls which objects an external user can reach and which event you are billed on. The largest cost decision is made audience by audience, between member based and login based billing, and a wrong choice rarely shows in year one because the bill grows with the audience.

Community Cloud became Experience Cloud

Salesforce rebranded Community Cloud as Experience Cloud. The external license families carried over, and the buying mechanics did not change in substance. Older contracts may still name community licenses, and those entitlements remain valid.

This matters when you reconcile. An order form from before the rebrand and a quote from this year can describe the same entitlement in different words, so map both to one list before you compare what you own with what you use. Internal editions and add ons are covered in our Salesforce licensing guide.

Which external license types does Salesforce sell?

External licenses split by audience. Customer community types suit self service and support, while partner community types add sales objects such as leads and opportunities for resellers and distributors. List prices sit on the Experience Cloud pricing page.

Our Experience Cloud pricing guide for 2026 compares member, login and External Apps licenses line by line. Use it alongside your own quote, since the discount Salesforce offers often differs by license type.

How do member based and login based licenses differ?

Both models grant the same access and bill on different events. Member based charges a flat monthly fee for every provisioned external user, and login based charges for monthly logins bought in blocks. Which one is cheaper depends entirely on how often each audience logs in.

Member based licensing

You pay for every provisioned external user, whether they log in or not. The cost is predictable and rises with the size of the audience rather than its activity, which suits users who work in the portal most days.

The weakness is provisioning drift. A customer who registers once and never returns keeps costing the full monthly fee until someone deactivates the account.

Login based licensing

You buy a number of monthly logins in blocks, and each login draws against that allowance. Occasional users who visit a few times a month cost little on this model, while daily users cost far more than a member seat. Salesforce sets out how external logins are counted in its login based license documentation.

Three counting rules shape the real price per visit. Salesforce documents them in its Experience Cloud license documentation, and you should confirm your order form does not override them.

• Daily unique logins. A user who signs in several times in one day consumes one login, and moving between your sites after signing in consumes none. Model login days per user, not sessions.
• Annual measurement. Unused logins roll over from month to month, and overage is calculated over the 12 months from the contract start. Buying 1,000 monthly logins entitles you to 12,000 logins a year.
• Provisioning ratio. You can provision up to 20 login licenses for each monthly login you buy. Registering more login users than that means buying more logins, whatever those users actually do.

Which model fits which external audience?

Where is the break even between member and login licenses?

The break even is your monthly member price divided by your price per login. Below that number of login days per user per month, login based is cheaper, and above it member based wins. Always use the discounted rates on your own quote.

The table below uses hypothetical rates of $10 per member per month and $2 per login. They are round numbers picked to make the arithmetic easy to follow, not a quote for any license type. At those rates the break even is 5 login days per user per month.

A worked example with two audiences

Say you run a customer portal with 5,000 registered users at the same hypothetical rates. Of those, 3,000 are support customers who log in about twice a month, and 2,000 are active users who log in on about 15 days a month.

The split costs $216,000 a year less than putting everyone on member licenses, a 36 percent reduction. It also costs $480,000 less than putting everyone on login blocks, because each single model prices one of the two audiences badly.

Before relying on a split like this, test it against a full year and next year's growth. Support logins bunch around outages, product launches and renewal notices. Rollover absorbs a single busy month, but a portal that keeps growing will use more than 12 times its monthly purchase and land in overage.

What drives external user cost as a community scales?

External cost rarely jumps because Salesforce raises the unit price. It jumps because the audience grows and the licensing model no longer fits it. Three drivers account for most of the increase.

Audience growth

Member based cost scales in a straight line with provisioned users. A portal that doubles its registered audience doubles that line of the invoice, even if half the new users never come back after their first visit.

Login overages

Login blocks carry a monthly allowance, measured across the contract year. A marketing push, a renewal season or steady portal growth can take annual logins past the purchased total and trigger overage billing that no one forecast. That is where a login based deal gives back the savings it was bought for.

• Provisioning drift. Deactivate external users who never return, so their member licenses can be reassigned or dropped at renewal.
• Login peaks and growth. Size the monthly login purchase so that 12 months of it covers the expected annual total, busy months included, and check the 20 to 1 provisioning ratio as registrations grow.
• Object creep. When a few customers need reports or wider data, move only those users to Customer Community Plus. Upgrading the whole audience raises the price of every user in it.

Should you standardize every external audience on member licenses?

The common advice is to standardize on member based licensing because it is predictable and simpler to administer. We disagree whenever a large share of the audience is occasional. In that case a single model applied across every external audience overpays by a wide margin.

We have seen login based licensing cut external cost by 30 to 50 percent for support audiences that visit a few times a year. The better course is to segment external users by real login frequency, license each segment on the model that fits, and revisit the split at every renewal as the audience shifts.

What have we seen in recent Experience Cloud negotiations?

We benchmarked roughly 25 to 35 Salesforce community and Experience Cloud engagements in 2024 and 2025. In most of them the cost problem was the wrong licensing model applied to the wrong audience, and the unit price came second. Three patterns came up repeatedly.

• Daily users on login blocks. Frequent external users sat on login based licenses and cost 2 to 4 times what a member based seat would have.
• Members who never log in. Provisioned member based users who never logged in made up 15 to 30 percent of the external user base.
• Peaks no one modeled. Login allowance overages appeared in 2 of every 5 contracts, because login peaks and audience growth were never forecast against the allowance.

Across the roughly 30 engagements in that set, remodeling the external licenses cut external cost by a median of 30 percent. When we checked login history, 22 percent of the provisioned users we reviewed turned out to be dormant.

How do you check which external users you are paying for?

Compare three things in your own org: licenses held, licenses used, and how often each external user actually signs in. Pull them before the account team sends a renewal quote, because that quote will start from the licenses you hold today.

• Setup, Company Information. The User Licenses list shows total and used counts for each external license type. The Usage based Entitlements list shows your login allowance and how many logins you have consumed.
• Last login on user records. A user report filtered by license type and sorted by Last Login shows who has not signed in for 90 or 180 days.
• Login History. Setup shows the past 6 months of logins to Salesforce and to your Experience Cloud sites, and you can download that window as a file. Save a download at least every 6 months to build the 12 months of history that segmentation needs.

Join these into one table per audience: license type, provisioned count, users active in the last 90 days, and average login days per active user each month. That table drives every decision above, and it is the evidence you put in front of Salesforce when you ask for a different mix.

What will the Salesforce account team say about external licensing?

Expect the conversation to lean toward larger member counts and upgrades, because both grow the recurring total. These are lines buyers commonly hear, with replies that keep the discussion on your data.

What should the Experience Cloud order form say?

It should fix the rates for external licenses you add, let you move users between models, and state how logins and overage are measured. Ask for these terms in the same negotiation as the licenses, because each becomes much harder to win once the order form is signed.

1. Price hold for additions. The per member and per login rates apply to external licenses added during the term, so growth is billed at the price you negotiated.
2. Conversion between models. The right to move users between member and login licenses at renewal, value for value, as the audience changes.
3. Annual login measurement. Confirm the order form keeps the documented rules, with unused logins rolling over and overage measured across 12 months, and adds no monthly cap.
4. Overage terms. Overage logins billed at the contracted per login rate, with notice before any charge appears on an invoice.
5. Reduction right. The right to lower external license quantities at renewal after you remove dormant users, without losing the discount on the rest.

Salesforce will not grant every item in every deal, so rank them by what your login data says matters most. Our guide to Salesforce hidden costs covers the other contract terms that surprise buyers.

How the priorities change with portal size

Take a hypothetical 2,000 user partner portal. The audience is small, active and expensive per head, so the Partner Community rate and the price hold for additions deserve most of the effort. Dormancy matters less when every partner logs in to register deals.

A hypothetical portal with 200,000 registered customers has the opposite problem, with a low rate per user and a large count full of people who registered once. On login licenses, the 20 to 1 ratio alone requires at least 10,000 monthly logins for that many provisioned users, so deactivation rules are worth more than a few extra points of discount.

How should you review the external license split before renewal?

Segment the audience again before every renewal and shift users to the cheaper model, because a split that fit at signature can be wrong a year later. Work back from the renewal date as below.

Our Salesforce renewal timeline places this review inside the wider renewal sequence, and our CIO guide to licensing external users in Experience Cloud covers site design choices that affect license type.

Price each external audience on how often it actually logs in, and check the answer again before every renewal.

What to do next

1. Collect a year of logins. Pull login analytics for every external audience over a full year.
2. Band the users. Segment external users into daily, weekly and rare bands.
3. Match model to band. Put each segment on member based or login based licensing, using your contracted rates to find the break even.
4. Remove dormant accounts. Deactivate provisioned users who have not logged in for months.
5. Size logins for the year. Buy enough monthly logins to cover the expected annual total, busy months included, and keep provisioned login users within the 20 to 1 ratio.
6. Check the wider spend. Run the software spend health check across your other vendors.
7. Repeat before renewal. Segment and price the audience again before every renewal.
8. Get independent help early. Engage independent Salesforce advisory before the next order form.

Frequently asked questions