SalesForce

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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

Platform Name SalesForce

Description 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.

Web Site https://www.salesforce.com/products/community-cloud/overview/

Founded 1999

Rating

3.0 out of 5 (10 Reviews)

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

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Pricing

Minimum Price 48000.00

Pricing Tiers

20k to 100k: $48k
100k+: $120k

License Type Month-to-Month

Free Self Hosting No

Free Trial Yes, get a free trial

Discount None

Paid Modules None

Implementation Charges

Limited: $40k to $100k
Medium: $100k to $250k
High: $250k to $500k

Support Charges None

Additional Charges None

Details

Open Source / Enterprise Enterprise

Security

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

Support Software warranty support

Hosting SAAS (Multi-Tenant)

Analytics

Canned Reports
Customizable Reports
Predictive analytics
Realtime data visualization
Supports Google Analytics
Omniture
API for integration/selective exports

Customization High

Integration API’s available + pre-built integrations with other systems

Add Ons / Extensions

E-Commerce
2500+ AppExchange apps
Mobile SDK
SharePoint
OneDrive
Google Drive

Registration

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

Rating

3.0 out of 5

Pros*

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

Cons*

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

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

Overall very good, but always room for improvement

June 14, 2019 | Leo Daley

Salesforce Community Cloud is THE Future

February 8, 2019 | Andrew Mishalove

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All Customer Reviews

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

Pros

Very customisable if you have a team of dedicated developers

Cons

Difficult to use for non-technical resources
Out of the box templates are limited

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

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.

Pros

Ease of use
Little coding required
Inherent Salesforce integration

Cons

Little customization
Little technical documentation
New product (so still not very developed)

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

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.

Pros

Easy to get up and running quickly
Some branding options
Moderation and some engagement metrics in back-end
Email notifications

Cons

Not easy to customize components
Strange UX issues
Inconsistent design in out-of-box components

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

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.

Pros

- 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

Cons

- 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

SalesForce

Overview

Pricing

Details

Notable Clients

Features

Customer Reviews of SalesForce

Reviews Summary

Latest Reviews

Submit Review

Thanks for Your Review

All Customer Reviews

Difficult to manage for non-technical users

Overall very good, but always room for improvement

Salesforce Community Cloud is THE Future

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

Feature thin, good integration

New Product, Basic Features

Clunky and Expensive

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

A costly headache

Highly customizable

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