Salesforce Experience Cloud vs. Salesforce Lightning Components & Developer Experience

HR and Employee Self-Service Portals: Organizations using Salesforce Experience Cloud can leverage Salesforce CMS to create centralized knowledge hubs for HR policies, onboarding resources, and internal communications. Employees can access up-to-date content without IT involvement, improving efficiency and reducing HR’s administrative burden. Multi-Channel Content Distribution: Businesses needing to push content across different touchpoints (web, mobile, email, and customer portals) benefit from Salesforce CMS’s ability to deliver consistent messaging seamlessly. A sales enablement team can publish case studies and product updates on a customer portal while simultaneously integrating content into marketing emails. Personalized & Dynamic Content: Companies using Salesforce CRM can leverage Salesforce CMS to deliver AI-driven, tailored content based on user behavior, preferences, or past interactions. For example, a recruiting team can show custom job recommendations based on a candidate’s past applications.

Incentivized

Salesforce CMS is well suited for those companies which are already using Salesforce. If you want to provide personalized content according to individual customer. If you want to share the content across multiple channels. Salesforce CMS is not typically suited for companies not using salesforce. Simple blogging does not require a Salesforce CMS.

Incentivized

• Easy to use, just like Salesforce's other products. Many users can sit down and figure it out in no time, and with a little training become power users.
• Fast and secure - Salesforce is a leader in the cloud world so you get consistently fast results and security that is top notch in the industry.
• Accessible from anywhere - if you use cloud CMS already this is a no-brainer, but for those that do in-house CMS still, this is a major difference. Mobile access from anywhere on the planet without a VPN is something you just can't do without the cloud.

Incentivized

• Reporting and Dashboards are thorough and can show a wealth of important data to inform and scale processes. It's helpful in a high volume sales cycle to be able to quickly identify weak points in performance and productivity so that adjustments can be made.
• Highly customizable. We are able to customize just about everything which allows us to track very specific things and in theory create better efficiency.
• Parent/Child account hierarchy exists which is helpful.
• Contact records can be associated with multiple accounts and opportunities. This, in theory, should minimize duplicates and mismanagement of contacts.
• Console helps a lot with data nesting. Having a fairly comprehensive look at an account without searching through various tabs and sections speeds up an otherwise cumbersome platform.

Incentivized

• The documentation for implementing Experience Cloud can be a bit confusing as their rebranding hasn't made it's way into all articles, resulting in different terminology being used to refer to the same thing
• Some things are not as intuitive regarding their customizability, so there's a bit of a learning curve (i.e. Lightning apps can't be used to customize layouts in Experience Cloud)

Incentivized

• It takes a while before it recognizes bounced emails.
• We get so many notifications from a single action. Not sure if this can be modified in the settings though.
• Error messages are sometimes unclear which makes it hard for us to identify the problem.

Renewal exercise is already underway. Platform is to ubiquitous to not leverage, especially at a Fortune 50 firm

Incentivized

It's very easy to train users on this, even external facing customers. Our users were already familiar with Salesforce user interface since we use the platform for other reasons. We built custom Visualforce pages with a simple, clean layout so we didn't need to train customers. That's ultimately the goal for external facing stuff, that we don't need to train them; they just "get it."

Incentivized

It's very good, but it's still living in a little bit in an older design aspect, but I think a lot of it is about to come out, just hasn't quite gotten there yet. Still a little clunky from a you have to know it to know it or you know it to use it. It takes a little bit of training to get into it. It's not quite the, anybody can come in and start using it immediately, type feel.

Incentivized

Again, since we provide and recommend solutions, I can't speak to every client's individual experience, but can offer general reflections as to keep their collaborations private, that they are satisfied with the experience. We hear a lot about how this system helps to encourage collaborations between their own business partners, customers, and internal members, and enables quality integrations with other products that help drive revenue.

Incentivized

Although support from Salesforce itself can be quite unresponsive sometimes, the community hub is incredibly helpful. The large user base of Salesforce products contribute to troubleshooting and the forums are a powerful tool for finding solutions and possible bugs and response times can be quite fast compared to your regular support channels.

Incentivized

Salesforce's support is top-notch. They have subject-matter experts that are accessible at all times to address needs as they come up. They let you know in advance when there are system updates and enhancements so that you are prepared for upcoming changes. I've never had an issue that wasn't addressed immediately when reaching out for support.

Incentivized

Yeah, so we've utilized a few different evaluations of products. Most of them are website or WordPress base, intranet, hidden backend applications. It's just because all the data we have already and we have multiple experience clouds, it allows us to leverage SSO or single sign-on approach across of our experience cloud. So it's less because all one platform, it's less complex for the end user and less confusing.

Incentivized

This fits into the mold with the other Salesforce services. Once you get used to the suite and the nuances of each platform, things become easy. Just read any documentation first, as jumping in will only get you so far, and the more connections with the other apps, the more complex it gets.

Incentivized

• Before using Salesforce, different teams managed content separately, leading to duplication and inconsistencies.
• Using Salesforce within Experience Cloud, we have improved our customer service portal, reducing ticket volume.
• Our sales team can access and share content directly from Salesforce without searching external folders.

Incentivized

• It has a smooth integration with Salesforce CMS application which can make it a positive for enhanced performance.
• It may require extensive training for new joiners and that can become costly for the organization.
• It also has automation features that reduce the distribution time by a significant number.

Incentivized