Building an online community with Salesforce’s Community Cloud is a great way to offer a multitude of services to your partners, employees, and customers. To ensure long-term success of the community, you need a tool that is both capable of handling your current business goals and scalable towards your future needs. There are three ways to build a custom user interface within Salesforce communities— with a Content Management System (CMS), Visualforce pages, or Lightning Community Builder. Each offers unique advantages for different use cases. Here I’ll explain the capabilities of each option for consideration as you build your community. 

This is an example of what your decision making process may look like. There are many things to consider when choosing an interface, this being a summary of a few big factors. When selecting an interface tool consider:

1. What is the community’s purpose?
2. Who are the members of the community?
3. Who will maintain and monitor the community?
4. What is the source of the community content?
5. What device(s) will the community be using?

Content Management Systems: For customized, multi-purpose website communities.

Content Management Systems (CMS) are a traditional way to build website communities. They offer the advantages of being highly customizable, scalable, and capable enough to serve multiple communities at once. If you need to service employees, partners, and customers all in one place, a CMS interface will be useful. To harness the full capabilities of a CMS, you’ll need developer resources. If you plan on using a third party to build and maintain your community, a CMS is a great option because the front-end of the site can be managed by an outside resource without needing to grant them access to your Salesforce organization where company data is stored. Note that to make a community website accessible across multiple devices, your development resource will need specialized knowledge of code to accommodate that scale. If your community will not contain user generated content, a CMS is an optimal choice. In summary, this solution is best for large enterprise-level businesses that need to build unique portals for different user groups, or be able to run their community page in multiple languages. 

Visualforce: For low maintenance and beautiful portals.

Communities built with Visualforce are both customizable and native to Salesforce, making data integration seamless. Visualforce pages can be used to create beautiful and functional user interfaces for your communities. If you have Salesforce developers and admins in your organization, creating and maintaining a community interface with Visualforce is simple. Community content generated by an integration, such as calendar events created in an app that then need to sync with the community’s data, works well with Visualforce. While Visualforce offers less customization and functionality than a full CMS, a big advantage is that pages will scale across devices if they are built in the Lightning instance. This is a great middle-ground solution for businesses that want to create customized community pages with multiple functions but don’t need the high capability and maintenance demands of a CMS. Employee self-service use cases, or public web pages that don’t require heavy customization, like comprehensive sitemaps, can all be built and maintained with Visualforce.

Lightning Community Builder: For simplicity and easy set-up.

Finally, Salesforce’s Community Builder allows creation of branded customer interfaces without the custom development requirements of a CMS or Visualforce. Community Builder has pre-structured page layouts that are perfect for product catalogues, community forums, or providing a place to receive customer feedback. The page layouts are mobile-browser responsive  and can be maintained and built with admin experience only. Page layouts are built with different components that are selected for your organization based on your use case. Each component has a specific function, which allows the creation of different page layouts with custom functions inside the community. For example; within a self-service interface when you use the keyword search bar, it automatically searches the knowledge base for results. A component could be added to the search results page which shows related topics being discussed in the community forums.

Identifying the main function(s) you need your online community to accomplish is the best way to identify what tool you should build that community with. For example, when we built a community interface for Midwest Operating Engineers Union, we identified a need for a customized, engaging online community that would allow employees to log in and manage their health benefit plans. Because the community had two main functions and needed to be customized, we chose Visualforce as the best building tool.

For help crafting the perfect community for your business, connect with our experts.