Experience Cloud License and membership

 Experience Cloud Authentication Groups:

1.Guest Users

Represents all unauthenticated users (i.e. the public)

2.External Users

Partners and customers : users that do not have a "standard" license.

3.Internal Users 

Employees and contractors : users with  a standard license.

Note :

Unauthenticated access to a Salesforce community does not require a license.This applies to Guest users.

Membership : Junction of the user and a community. And this grants a person access.

The keys to Community Membership :

A license is required for authenticated community membership.

A user profile associated with an appropriate license type must exist.

A user record must be created with an applicable user profile.

When a user profile is added to a community,all users with that profile are now licensed users of that community.

Permission Sets :

Granting an individual access to a community can be done via permission sets.

Allows maintenance of existing profiles without providing unnecessary access.

Permission Set access is used less often than granting access via user profiles.

This would typically be used as an exception, not the standard for access.

License Types and Capabilities :

1.Customer Community 

Customer community provide access to a few key standard objects,

such as accounts,contacts,cases,products and orders, upto 10 custom objects.

chatters, files and knowledge (read-only)

2.Customer community plus

Customer community plus takes everything that customer community has and adds a few key additions.

Additional Read/Write access to standard objects.

Reports and Dashboards

Roles

Advanced sharing

Additional Data Storage

Additional API Calls

Delegated Admin

3.Partner community

Partner license types provide everything that customer community plus has along with access to additional standard objects.

leads,opportunities

Also some additional data storage and territory management.

4.Commerce portals

Similar to Customer Community.

with less standard objects and more custom objects.

5.External Apps

it's similar to Partner,has more storage , API calls , custom objects(100).

6.Channel Account

Same as Partner, but billed per partner instead of per user.

upgrade paths between community licenses :

Quick & easy Upgrade path :

From Customer Community to either customer community plus or Partner community.

This upgrade is fairly straightforward.

Multi-step Upgrade path :

possible Upgrade between Customer Community Plus and Partner.however, it takes a little bit more work to make that happen.

To take a user who has a Customer Community Plus or a Partner license and move them to Customer Community 

requires a significant amount of work and is not a standard upgrade path.

Named User vs User Login Licenses :

A named user license, or simply user, is associated with a named, dedicated user record and is associated with all corresponding logins over time.

The user login license type is not named or dedicated to one person. It is associated with an instance of authenticated access.

 

The named user license type is acquired and is associated with an individual user. That user logs in. Let's say that user logged in four times in a month. The license count, however, will only be 1 because all 4 logins are associated with the named user.

The user login scenario is different. This user logs in 3 times in a month, and each of those is added to the total, which is 3. So a user with a user login license type that logs in 3 times uses 3 licenses in that month.

 

Note :

A fully optimized license allocation assumes a named user assignment for users that have 3+ logins/month.