High-Volume Portal Users
High-Volume Portal Users (HVPU) is the legacy Salesforce user-license type designed for Customer Portal and Partner Portal deployments where the number of external users counted in the hundreds of thousands or millions.
Definition
High-Volume Portal Users (HVPU) is the legacy Salesforce user-license type designed for Customer Portal and Partner Portal deployments where the number of external users counted in the hundreds of thousands or millions. The license traded most of the standard portal-user features (role hierarchy participation, manual sharing, sharing rules) for radically lower per-user pricing, making large-scale customer self-service viable on Salesforce. The license is now called High Volume Customer Portal User in modern terminology, with the equivalent Experience Cloud license being Customer Community (HVCC) or the External Apps + High Volume licensing in current Salesforce pricing.
HVPU users have no role, do not participate in the role hierarchy, and gain record access only through explicit sharing rules and account-based sharing. The trade-off saves enormous amounts of memory and processing power on the Salesforce side, but it means the standard sharing model many admins know does not apply. Designing record access for HVPU users is a specialized skill, and getting it wrong is the most common reason large-scale Communities projects struggle in their first year.
Why a special license exists for large-scale portal traffic
The role-hierarchy bottleneck
Standard portal user licenses participate in the role hierarchy. Each portal user has a role, and the role grants implicit access to records owned by users below them in the hierarchy. With millions of portal users, the role hierarchy becomes a multi-million-node tree, which crushes performance on every sharing recalculation, every role change, and every record-access check. High-Volume Portal Users sit outside the hierarchy entirely; they never appear in any role, and the hierarchy does not need to track them.
Account-based sharing as the substitute
Because HVPU users lack roles, the platform substitutes Account-based sharing. Salesforce automatically grants the HVPU user read or read-write access to records related to their Account, based on the account contact''s lookup relationships. A customer-service self-service community uses this to give each external user access to their own Cases, Orders, and Assets without an admin-defined sharing rule. The relationship is computed at query time, not stored as sharing-rule rows.
Sharing Sets and Share Groups
The two declarative tools for HVPU sharing are Sharing Sets and Share Groups. A Sharing Set links the HVPU user to records owned by a specific Account or Contact. A Share Group lets internal users see records owned by HVPU users (the reverse direction). Both are configured under Setup, Experience Cloud Workspaces, Sharing Settings. Without them, HVPU users have a very narrow access model.
Pricing and the licensing tradeoff
HVPU licenses historically priced 50 to 90 percent below standard Customer Portal Manager licenses. The savings drove adoption for customer-service portals (Verizon Wireless, banks with millions of online customers, telco support communities). The trade-off was the lost ability to use standard sharing rules; admins designing for HVPU traded sharing flexibility for cost.
Modern naming and Experience Cloud equivalents
Modern Salesforce uses Customer Community (Login), Customer Community Plus, and External Apps licensing for Experience Cloud sites. The High Volume part of the legacy name maps to the Customer Community Login license, where each login costs a fraction of a named-user license but the user lacks role-hierarchy participation. The same Sharing Set and Share Group patterns apply.
When to choose HVPU over standard portal users
Pick HVPU/Customer Community Login when the user count exceeds about 50,000 and the sharing model can be expressed via Sharing Sets. Pick Customer Community Plus when users need role hierarchy participation, role-based sharing, or access to internal Salesforce objects beyond the standard portal set. The line moves over time as Salesforce releases new sharing features; check the current edition comparison before committing.
Performance implications of HVPU at scale
HVPU was designed for performance, and orgs with millions of users typically see better page-load performance than orgs with comparable Customer Community Plus volumes. The cost is a less flexible sharing model and a steeper admin learning curve. Tuning Sharing Sets for the common access patterns is the difference between fast and slow community pages.
Configure sharing for High-Volume Portal Users
The setup loop is Sharing Sets first, Share Groups second. Most HVPU community designs need at least one Sharing Set per external object.
- Identify external objects users need access to
List every standard and custom object the external user should see. Common picks: Cases, Orders, Assets, Custom Object My Subscriptions.
- Define Account-based sharing logic
For each object, decide the path from the HVPU user to the records. The standard pattern is Account.Id, but custom lookups can drive the path.
- Create a Sharing Set per object
Setup, Experience Cloud Workspaces, Sharing Settings, Sharing Sets, New. Pick the user profile, the target object, and the access mapping path.
- Test as the HVPU user
Log in as a community user, verify the expected records appear, verify no unexpected records appear. Iterate until the access model matches the design.
- Create Share Groups for internal-side visibility
Share Groups grant internal users access to records owned by HVPU users. Build one Share Group per internal team that needs that visibility.
- Monitor performance
Track page-load performance and SOQL query times on the community pages. Sharing Sets evaluate at query time, so poorly indexed paths cause slowdowns.
- HVPU users do not participate in role hierarchy. Sharing rules that grant access via Roles + Subordinates do nothing for these users.
- Sharing Sets evaluate at query time. Poorly indexed lookup paths cause slow page loads at scale; index the foreign keys in the path.
- Switching a user from Customer Community Plus to Customer Community Login (HVPU equivalent) loses any role-based sharing access immediately. Plan license changes carefully.
- Audit Sharing Sets and Share Groups quarterly. Drift between the design intent and the actual configuration accumulates as objects are added.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- High Volume Portal UsersSalesforce Help
- Sharing SetsSalesforce Help
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on High-Volume Portal Users.
- Share GroupsSalesforce Help
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
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