Partner Portal
A Partner Portal is the legacy Salesforce Classic feature that gave resellers and other channel partners a branded login to a slice of your CRM data.
Definition
A Partner Portal is the legacy Salesforce Classic feature that gave resellers and other channel partners a branded login to a slice of your CRM data. A partner logged in and saw only the leads routed to their own account. Deal registration and shared opportunities ran there too, with no access to your internal org.
Salesforce closed it to new customers in Summer '13. Orgs that already had one keep full access, but nobody can create a new partner portal today. The supported replacement is an Experience Cloud site built on the Partner Central template.
The licensing survived. Partner portal licenses you already own can be reused on an Experience Cloud site, so migrating is usually a rebuild of the interface, not a fresh purchase.
In plain English
“Think of a company that sells through other shops. It wants each shop to see the sales inquiries meant for that shop and nothing else. Partner Portal was the old website that did this. Salesforce stopped giving out new ones long ago.”
Worked example
Meridian Pumps has run a partner portal since 2011 for its 60 regional distributors. A distributor logs in and sees a Lead with Lead Source set to Trade Show, routed to the partner account Cascade Supply Co. That user holds a Partner Community license with the Partner Manager role, so they see their own team's records and nothing from the other 59 distributors. When Meridian's admin needs a second portal for a new European channel, Setup offers no way to create one. The admin builds an Experience Cloud site on Partner Central instead and reuses the existing licenses.
How Partner Portal ended up frozen in place
Legacy, not retired, and no end date exists
Salesforce publishes a running list of past product and feature retirements. Partner Portal is not on it. That distinction carries weight. A retired feature arrives with a date and a deadline behind it. This one has neither. Existing orgs are not on a clock, which reads as good news until you try to get the replacement funded.
Classic only, which is the real cost
The portal runs in Salesforce Classic. That one line in the requirements box does more damage than the closure ever did, because every partner tool Salesforce has shipped since targets Lightning and Experience Builder. Your partners keep a 2013 interface long after your internal team moved on.
Your old licenses still spend
Experience Cloud sites accept existing Customer Portal, Authenticated Website, and partner portal licenses. Migration is cheaper than most people assume. Watch the role count instead. Portal and site roles share one cap of 50,000 per org, so a cutover running both in parallel spends from a single pool.
What you build instead
Buying partner licenses switches on the Partner Central template, a default Partner User profile, three standard partner roles, and the Enable as Partner and Enable Partner User buttons. The build starts in Setup, under Digital Experiences.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Partner Portal.
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Partner Portal.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He writes and edits salesforcedictionary.com, published by KineticBit Inc., to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
+5 pts / dayQ1. What happened to the Salesforce partner portal in Summer '13?
Q2. You move partners from a legacy partner portal onto an Experience Cloud site. What happens to the partner portal licenses you already own?
Q3. A new org wants a branded site where resellers register deals and pick up assigned leads. What should the admin build?
Discussion
Loading discussion…