Enterprises today want a fully customizable yet cost-effective employee portal that is integrated with Salesforce and requires minimal/no technical expertise or coding to implement.

Best Salesforce Experience Cloud Alternatives in 2023

Salesforce Experience Cloud fulfills all these needs and serves as an excellent solution for building engaging websites, portals, online communities, and bespoke customer experiences.

This empowers organizations to deliver fast, seamless interactions and drive customer and employee engagement as well. However, even after being one of the top solutions, few find Experience Cloud a pricey and non-flexible option for their specific business use cases.

To help you navigate this better, we are going to explore more about Salesforce Experience Cloud here, its advantages, drawbacks, and some of the top Salesforce Experience Cloud alternatives in 2023.

What Is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

Formerly known as Salesforce Community, Salesforce Experience Cloud is essentially a platform to help companies build branded websites or online communities.

With time, the platform evolved with multiple updates to serve as a broad solution for creating engaging websites, online communities, and self-service experiences.

Pros of Experience Cloud

Among the main advantages of Experience Cloud are-

  • Experience Builder in the Salesforce Experience Cloud makes community development easy and fast. Apart from this, it also allows you to build a productive and successful website by using layouts, themes, templates, standard and custom components, as well as other personalization options.
  • Salesforce Experience Cloud also lets you create, customize, and maintain various online communities specifically tailored to your unique audience and business needs.
  • Another advantage of Salesforce Experience Cloud CMS is that it does not need you to duplicate your content to deliver it to all of your websites. You can simply reprocess the content you have already created or built by setting up connections to obtain content from your external CMS into the respective website.
  • The AppExchange feature of Experience Cloud allows you to enhance your Salesforce community functionality with various third-party components and applications.

For instance, using a powerful Advanced Communities Salesforce event management app, you can enhance your productivity, community management, and analytics, as well as streamline event creation.

Drawbacks of Salesforce Experience Cloud

Although the platform has several advantages, there are a few drawbacks, too. Among these are-

  • You can not use the platform for in-line editing of tables, repeated elements, and other engaging elements.
  • This option is more on the expensive side. This is true, especially if you have tailored/specific requirements or you are a large enterprise with a high number of users.
  • The out-of-the-box options in Experience Cloud do not give you much flexibility to customize and adjust your page layout to suit your specific needs.
  • Outside integrations are complex in the experience cloud and require extensive development.
  • Offers a limited number of templates.

pros and cons using salesforce experience cloud

Top 2 Alternatives for Salesforce Experience Cloud in 2023

If you are looking for top alternatives to Experience Cloud, here are the options you should check out:

Custom Development

One of the top alternatives to building a portal or website to suit the specific needs of your business is drawing on the resources of custom development.

The best part is that this option gives you the solution for various limitations that come with Salesforce Experience Cloud, as discussed in the next section.

Pros of Custom Development

There are several benefits of choosing a custom development option over Experience Cloud. A few of these are listed below-

  • By utilizing custom development, you can enlist the expertise of qualified developers to design a customized UX for your website. This enables you to break free from the limitations of Salesforce’s UX when determining the experience customers have when visiting your website.
  • Custom development offers you much higher control and ownership over the source code, intellectual property, and future enhancements.
  • With custom development, you have the option to customize your portal or web application for any possible use case.
  • Another advantage of custom development is that it equips you with the ability to create a dynamic layout for any and every device. This means you can create a layout for a mobile or a laptop without many restrictions.

Cons of Custom Development

Similar to any other option, custom development also has a few drawbacks. Among these are-

  • One of the drawbacks of custom development is that building a custom-made portal or web app can be quite a time-consuming process that requires significant investment.
  • Another challenge here is that developing a custom portal or web app requires specialized technical skills and resources.
  • Developing a custom web application also requires you to stay updated with the latest technologies with new features, platforms, and frameworks.
  • Expenses and security are other drawbacks of this option. Apart from being an expensive option, building a secure web app or portal requires various security measures and compliance regulations.
  • Developing a web app or portal in-house also comes with several integration challenges with existing systems, databases, or other third-party services.

Titan’s Digital Experience Platform

Titan Digital is yet another excellent Salesforce Experience Cloud alternative that allows you to conveniently build your portals,  forms, surveys, websites, and more.

The highlight of Titan is that it is a completely zero-code platform that requires no technical expertise. Besides, the platform has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that allows to build as well as configure robust websites across industries.

Pros of Titan

Among the main advantages of Titan are-

    • Allows real-time bi-directional integration with Salesforce
    • Titan offers a completely flexible user experience for personalized customer journeys
  • Allows you to create customized profiles
  • Let you generate documents  from within your app
  • Comes with various built-in third-party integrations

Cons of Titan

Some of the drawbacks of Titan includes-

  • Website domain/subdomain in Titan is limited to one per customer. You need to bear an extra cost for purchasing additional domains.
  • Onboarding time in Titan can vary from a minimum of 4 hours to a maximum of 20 hours based on the use case.
  • The platform requires a resource with Salesforce knowledge and experience.
  • For a very complex layout design, Titan requires you to add JS and CSS code to adjust to the platform’s needs.

To Conclude

To be able to build online communities, the need for customer portals today is immense as they take the pressure off the in-house support teams and improve overall customer experience.

By creating personalized journeys completely integrated with Salesforce, you not only get a comprehensive view of your customers but can also offer them unique experiences.

In this post, we have discussed Salesforce Experience Cloud for building portals, along with a few of the top alternatives and their pros and cons to help you make your pick, depending on your specific business needs and use case.

About MassMailer

MassMailer is a native Salesforce app designed to help you send emails to any Standard or Custom Object with file attachments.

One of the highlights of the app is that it eliminates the email limitations of Salesforce as well as allows you to track opens, bounces, clicks,  unsubscribes, and other similar statistics.