Online Community Software and Platforms

SalesForce

Star Rating

More than just a single product – it's a complete integrated solution for managing all interactions with your customers and prospects, designed to help your organisation grow and succeed.

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Overview

SalesForce
More than just a single product – it's a complete integrated solution for managing all interactions with your customers and prospects, designed to help your organisation grow and succeed.
1999
  • Easy to manage and update basic pages without admin/development resource.
  • Easy to connect to data objects within Salesforce itself.
  • Regular updates with new features and feature enhancements.
  • Flexibility of add ons and integrations via Salesforce's AppExchange.
  • Easy to begin a new community out-of-the-box.
  • Multiple language features.
  • Scalable and flexible.
  • Heavy development resource required to build components that don't come out-of-the-box.
  • Very expensive to build and maintain.
  • Flexibility of the standard components is limited and presents the occasional UX challenge.
  • Limited number of templates.
  • Lacking basic content types out-of-the-box including video, ideas, blog/blog posts.
  • Category-based content organization, while scalable, quickly becomes a mess.
  • Analytics very difficult to set up to be effective.
  • Updates to the platform can break custom-built functionality.
SalesForce

Pricing

48000.00
  • 20k to 100k: $48k
  • 100k+: $120k
Month-to-Month
No
Yes, get a free trial
None
None
  • Limited: $40k to $100k
  • Medium: $100k to $250k
  • High: $250k to $500k
None
None

Details

Enterprise
  • Two-factor authentication
  • Login IP Ranges
  • SSAE 16 SOC 1 audits
  • SSAE 16 SOC 2 audits
  • SSAE 16 SOC 3 audits
  • TRUSTe (US-EU compliant)
  • CSA STAR
  • HIPAA
  • ISO 27001/27018
  • FedRAMP
  • PCI-DSS
Software warranty support
SAAS (Multi-Tenant)
  • Canned Reports
  • Customizable Reports
  • Predictive analytics
  • Realtime data visualization
  • Supports Google Analytics
  • Omniture
  • API for integration/selective exports
High
API’s available + pre-built integrations with other systems
  • E-Commerce
  • 2500+ AppExchange apps
  • Mobile SDK
  • SharePoint
  • OneDrive
  • Google Drive
  • Social sign-up (Google)
  • Social sign-up (Twitter)
  • Social sign-up (Facebook)
  • Social sign-up (Other)
  • SSO (native or 3rd party)

Notable Clients

Features

Analytics / Reporting toolsAutomated community tour for newcomersAutomation rulesBloggingCase ManagementDirectoriesDiscussions / Activity FeedDocument CollaborationDocument PreviewsDocument SharingDocument UploadsEvents Calendar with RegistrationGroups (Public, Private, Secret)Knowledge BaseMention by @name
Mentor / volunteer matchingMicrositesMobile AppModeration toolsPermissions configurable by rolePersonalizationPollsPrivate Messaging / NotificationsQuestions (with ability to mark questions correct)Ratings and reviewsResponsive designSEO friendly linksSpam control toolsTask Management

Customer Reviews of SalesForce

Reviews Summary

Star Rating
3.0 out of 5
  • Very customisable if you have a team of dedicated developers
  • Availability and performance
  • Templates and OOTB components ease deployment and make maintenance fast and easy
  • HTML/CSS components make most customization of the community experience a self-sufficient exercise
  • Audience Targeting is great but is dependent on good, clean CRM data
  • Difficult to use for non-technical resources
  • Out of the box templates are limited
  • Search and Knowledge has not met our needs, so we moved to Search Unify for better federated and faceted search
  • Reporting has limits - no topic related reporting and no member 360 reporting - I created custom report types and merge reports in Access for a 360 view
  • Need a better GDPR solution for Google Analytics integration
* Taken from our most recent reviews

Latest Reviews

Person

Star Rating Difficult to manage for non-technical users

Out of the box functionality is very limited
Company need to hire Salesforce experienced staff to manage platform and build basic community functionality Read Full Review

January 19, 2022 | Anonymous

Person

Star Rating Overall very good, but always room for improvement

We've been on Community Cloud for nearly 3 years and with over 50,000 registered members, it's been an excellent platform for our customers and partners with near perfect availability and performance.... Read Full Review

June 14, 2019 | Leo Daley

Person

Star Rating Salesforce Community Cloud is THE Future

We just completed a major migration from Jive to Salesforce CC. With support from the Salesforce Community Cloud team and 7Summits, our Community looks and functions like a world class solution for o... Read Full Review

February 8, 2019 | Andrew Mishalove

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All Customer Reviews

Person

Star Rating Difficult to manage for non-technical users

January 19, 2022 | Anonymous

Out of the box functionality is very limited
Company need to hire Salesforce experienced staff to manage platform and build basic community functionality

  • Very customisable if you have a team of dedicated developers
  • Difficult to use for non-technical resources
  • Out of the box templates are limited
Person

Star Rating Overall very good, but always room for improvement

June 14, 2019 | Leo Daley

We've been on Community Cloud for nearly 3 years and with over 50,000 registered members, it's been an excellent platform for our customers and partners with near perfect availability and performance. Our use case is B2B software support, and the tight integration with Service Cloud is a big plus. The community templates and OOTB components ease deployment and maintenance, and HTML/CSS components make most customization of the community experience a self-sufficient exercise for any community professional that knows HTML/CSS or is willing to learn.

  • Availability and performance
  • Templates and OOTB components ease deployment and make maintenance fast and easy
  • HTML/CSS components make most customization of the community experience a self-sufficient exercise
  • Audience Targeting is great but is dependent on good, clean CRM data
  • New Gamification (Badging) has helped our "Superuser" program flourish
  • The Salesforce Trailblazer Community is great, as are the Salesforce professionals I've worked with
  • Looking forward to integrating with B2B eCommerce at some point
  • Search and Knowledge has not met our needs, so we moved to Search Unify for better federated and faceted search
  • Reporting has limits - no topic related reporting and no member 360 reporting - I created custom report types and merge reports in Access for a 360 view
  • Need a better GDPR solution for Google Analytics integration
  • Would like to see more OOTB components delivered each release - especially for cases and ideation - also more controls to customize OOTB components
  • Better navigation "breadcrumb" system needed to provide a "sense of place" for users
  • Require IT for custom Lightning component development. Lightning web components should ease this
Person

Star Rating Salesforce Community Cloud is THE Future

February 8, 2019 | Andrew Mishalove

We just completed a major migration from Jive to Salesforce CC. With support from the Salesforce Community Cloud team and 7Summits, our Community looks and functions like a world class solution for our customer, partners, and Dell Boomi team members. The feedback so far from everyone across our ecosystem has been very positive. We look forward to continuing to evolve our new solution with our partners at SF and 7S.

  • Easy to customize
  • Native integration with Service Cloud
  • Intuitive User Interface
  • Ability to build endless custom components
  • Custom objects
  • Ability to leverage universal search solutions such as Coveo for enhanced and cross platform search experience, case deflection, etc.
  • Robust customer journey analytics
  • Expanded marketplace
  • OOTB search is limited
  • OOTB objects are limited
  • @ mentioning functionality not as robust as Jive
  • Inability to embed video into certain objects a limiting factor
  • Inability to view source on certain objects a limiting factor
  • Data migration from Jive was difficult
  • Notification mechanisms require a lot of custom work
Person

Star Rating Up and coming platform and a no-brainer for Salesforce CRM users

March 22, 2017 | Nick Emmett

So Salesforce are probably in the slow starter lane in terms of maturity, however with every release (3 a year I seem to recall) the Community Cloud platform gets better and better.

We currently use one of the out of the box templates (the Customer Service/Napili) template, having switched from a Visualforce + Tabs configuration. The templates are very much the way to go if you don't have a development and admin team freely available. Building your pages is simple using the Lightning Components that easily drag and drop on to your page and connecting to objects in Salesforce is also easy.

Contrary to an earlier review, more traditional discussion format is available, rather than just Q&A, through the use of Chatter Groups - this is what we utilise, whilst the Question option is still available for people to ask, answer and mark as the Best Answer.

At the current time I have scored 3/5 but am confident that as the platform continues to develop then that will very likely rise.

  • Easy to build your pages through the Community Builder's drag & drop interface.
  • Easy to connect to your data objects within Salesforce itself.
  • Regular updates with new features and feature enhancements.
  • Easy for the Community Manager to manage and update the pages without admin/development resource.
  • Flexibility of add ons and integrations via Salesforce's AppExchange.
  • To implement anything out of the box you would need strong development resource to assist and build the required components.
  • The UI of some lesser used components occasionally look a little off on the published page.
  • Flexibility of the generic out of the box components only goes so far and presents the occasional UX challenge.
Person

Star Rating Feature thin, good integration

March 21, 2017 | Suzanne O'Brien

SalesForce has two community modules: tabular- and template-based.

The tabular model is the older module. In short, you create pages (tabs) for each part of your community, then insert standard SFDC widgets into the pages. It is very basic, has few features, but is extremely flexible from a technical point of view. A company with a large SFDC team will love that they can build whatever they want, using standard SFDC tools and code. But, it takes significant time to design, implement and maintain. A company without a large SFDC team, or with a business- rather than IT-based team, will quickly become frustrated using this module. In addition, since it's not SFDC's go-forward module for community, it's not being enhanced and bugs/defects are not being addressed.

SFDC's new community module is template based. I will add pros and cons below.

  • Easy to begin a new community
  • Can be managed by a non-technical person
  • Somewhat integrated with Salesforce CRM
  • Cheap (usually thrown in at low cost with rest of Salesforce contract)
  • Multiple language features
  • Flexible
  • Scalable
  • Category-based content organization is simple and scalable
  • For existing customers, difficult to convert from tabular form
  • Limited number of templates (3)
  • Lacking basic content types including video, ideas, blog/blog posts
  • Only Q&A discussions available - no plain discussion
  • Many standard functions within content unavailable
  • Several functions that exist in tabular module haven't been converted to template module
  • Category-based content organization, while scalable, quickly becomes a mess
  • Category-based content organization makes creating sections in order to accommodate users who are browsing difficult
  • Community managed
  • Wave Analytics, while touted at Dreamworks 2015 as being integrated with community, is not
  • Analytics very difficult to set up to be effective
Person

Star Rating New Product, Basic Features

March 16, 2017 | Anonymous

We use the new Salesforce Lightning platform (not force.com) to host our Community. While it's very simple to use, it really only comes equipped with super basic functionality, and implementing any customizations is a big challenge. While Salesforce is focusing most of their effort on developing the lightning experience going forward-- which means it'll only get better and better with each release-- I would not recommend it to those who want a platform with flexible technology, or are interested in implementing a lot of customization within their community.

  • Ease of use
  • Little coding required
  • Inherent Salesforce integration
  • Little customization
  • Little technical documentation
  • New product (so still not very developed)
Person

Star Rating Clunky and Expensive

March 15, 2017 | Nikoletta Harrold

Salesforce Visualforce was never meant to be a community platform therefore it is clunky and expensive to use and maintain as a community tool.

  • Great Integration with SFDC CRM and Customer Support tools
  • Visual force platform is free, you only pay by users/ logins
  • SFDC VF is a well established product and hence there are many SFDC shops (agencies) around the world competing for your projects.
  • Since there is no admin console for customization without coding/ development work, everything you do can and will look exactly like you want to
  • Extensive SFDC reporting as long as you know how to create reports in SFDC
  • Built in SFDC CMS system
  • Great API connections, massive library of 3rd party API connectors, since SFDC is the #1 CRM system in the world
  • Expensive configuration and implementation because everything is custom built and needs an agency (3rd party vendor)
  • Because everything is custom built any update to the platform will/ can break your functionality and community features
  • No agile methodology to roadmap and evolution of your community, since everything needs a trained and skill SFDC developer (either in-house resource or external contractor/ agency)
  • Surfacing data from your CRM for business partners means you have to purchase different access licenses for your community members (employee, customer and partner licenses)
  • No admin console for reporting, configurations, content etc.
Person

Star Rating A young product with promise, but currently sub-par.

March 9, 2017 | Anonymous

The Salesforce Community Cloud platform sounds like a good option up front. It provides templates for getting your community up and running quickly and they make it seem like branding is simple. However, the only branding you're going to get is a custom header and main color/font choices. You may initially think, 'that seems like all I need,' but you're forgetting about styling of other things like buttons, tabs, menus, search bar and results, etc. Not to mention, the styling of their out-of-box components often times do not match each other. It's very strange and I'm not sure why there is not more consistency.

Beyond design, the UX seems off at times. For example, you can't "like" a post unless you actually click into it first, you can only share a post to your followers or via email, auto-complete search results doesn't work with names of people, and the suggestions for topics while creating a post is all sorts of wonky.

IF IF IF all of the things above were easy to change, I would likely give Community Cloud one more star. However, most of the components do not allow you to change them at all. Which means even though you REALLY want/need to change things you can't. :( Okay okay, you actually can but you need to completely re-write the component which in most cases requires weeks of development work, which is simply not feasible.

  • Easy to get up and running quickly
  • Some branding options
  • Moderation and some engagement metrics in back-end
  • Email notifications
  • Not easy to customize components
  • Strange UX issues
  • Inconsistent design in out-of-box components
Person

Star Rating A costly headache

March 8, 2017 | Anonymous

I'll preface this and say, that the organisation were not great systems users (ironic, given we were in the software systems business).

We did not use SF CRM well - there was no consideration to strategy, structure, guidelines or process for using and maintaining it - so data was dirty and there were lots of fixes or band aids in place. This was not helped when we tried to use an out of the box community template when really we needed to spend for a more bespoke build. General lack of understanding about our specific Community requirements, how the Community would interface, and the impact of a badly set up and managed system was ultimately our downfall.

  • responsive and active support from the Community
  • has the potential to interface with other systems
  • when set up and maintained correctly, would be very powerful
  • didn't feel initial project scope was comprehensive (they didn't pick up the potential implications and limitations of our system set up)
  • a lack of understanding about our specific requirements and how they could support us
  • Community wasn't fit for our purpose
Person

Star Rating Highly customizable

March 6, 2017 | Danielle Bishop

We launched our community a couple of weeks ago and we are very happy with the amount of customizations we were able to create.

  • - Highly customizable
  • - When we change to Lightning you don't have to be a Salesforce administrator to update
  • - Built on salesforce so security is not a challenge
  • - Very expensive to build and maintain
  • - Do not care for the native email application
  • - We built our community entirely on Visual Force - still renders a view of the old out of the box community when the home page loads
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