Lightning Platform

The Lightning Platform (formerly Force.com) is the application development platform that powers all of Salesforce. It provides the infrastructure for building, deploying, and running custom applications with tools like the Lightning App Builder, Apex, Lightning Web Components, and a robust set of APIs. All Salesforce products are built on this platform.

Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Industry Clouds - each is a Salesforce product, but each is built on the same underlying foundation. Lightning Platform (formerly Force.com) is that foundation. The metadata-driven architecture, the multi-tenant database, the Lightning UI framework, the Apex runtime, the Lightning Web Components model, the integration APIs - every Salesforce product inherits from this platform, and every custom application built on Salesforce extends it.

The reason this matters even when you're not building from scratch is that platform-vs-product determines what's portable. A Sales Cloud-specific feature stays in Sales Cloud; a Lightning Platform feature is available regardless of which Salesforce products you've licensed. Knowing the difference helps with architectural decisions, license rationalization, and the perpetual question of how much custom development is worth versus how much should ride on platform capabilities.