Salesforce Licenses

• To enable specific Salesforce functionality for your users, you must choose one user license for each user.

• When creating or editing a Salesforce User, there is a picklist field that lets you assign a specific User License. 

• Salesforce License is like a driving license. If you want to drive the vehicle, you must have a License for that particular vehicle. Let’s say, if you want to drive a car, you must have a 4 wheeler car licence. Also, if you want to drive a bike, you must have a two wheeler license. Same way, you have different types of salesforce licenses depending on your needs.

• You can check Licenses details can using Setup-> Company Information

Types of Licenses

Salesforce provides the following types of licenses and usage-based entitlements.

1. User Licenses

2. Permission Set Licenses

3. Feature Licenses Overview

4. Usage-Based Entitlements

User Licenses

A user license determines the baseline of features that the user can access. Every user must have exactly one user license. You assign user permissions for data access through a profile and optionally one or more permission sets. User License determines which kind of profile can be assigned to a user.

You can check from Company Information or use query to retrieve the UserLicense

SELECT MasterLabel,Name,Status,TotalLicenses,UsedLicenses,UsedLicensesLastUpdated FROM UserLicense

There are different types of User License as below

• Standard User Licenses

• Salesforce

• Salesforce Platform

• Salesforce Platform Light

• Force.com-One App

• Force.com-Free

• Idea & Answer Internal User

• Contact Only User

• Knowledge Only User

• Chatter User Licenses- Users that have a Standard Salesforce License have free access to Chatter. For other users, Salesforce offers Chatter-specific licenses.

• Chatter Free

• Chatter Only - The Chatter Only license is available for purchase only by existing Chatter Plus customers. For new customers, the Lightning Platform Starter license is a step up from Chatter Only, giving your users access to a more robust set of features.

• Chatter External

• Communities User Licenses- Salesforce communities can be a huge boost for any business because it allows you to connect with your partners, customers and internal team in a curated and functional way. You can connect your Salesforce org, define exactly what data will be shown to users of the community and custom tailor it to your use case, sales, customer support, knowledge bases, you name it. There are actually 6 different licenses for external community users:

• Customer Community

• Customer Community Plus

• Partner Community

• Commerce Portals

• External Apps

• Channel Account.

Permission Set Licenses

• Permission set license is used to assign permissions to use various tools and functions which are not included in User License.

• You can find all PSL from Company page or from below SOQL query:

SELECT MasterLabel, ExpirationDate,TotalLicenses, UsedLicenses FROM PermissionSetLicense

• We can use permission set licenses to grant access, but not to deny access.

• Users can be assigned any number of permission set licenses.               

• Einstein Analytics Plus

• Event Monitoring Analytics Apps

• Health Cloud Platform

• Einstein Agent

• Einstein Search

• Einstein Analytics Plus

Feature Licenses

• A feature license entitles a user to access an additional feature that is not part of a user license, such as Marketing or Service Cloud User. Users can be assigned any number of feature licenses.

• The feature provides the ability to specify additional add-on functionality that can be supported in the edition. Features generally enabled add-on license in the org and things that a user cannot enable themselves in the org via setup.

• You can see all feature licenses from company information also if you want to get a feature license from the apex, there is no object which exposes these details. As these features are added to users, so we can use User objects to find most of the features count.

• Example- Find out Users having  “Marketing User”

Select count() From User where UserPermissionsMarketingUser=true and isActive=true

Usage-Based Entitlements

• A usage-based entitlement is a limited resource that your organization can use on a periodic basis. For example, the allowed number of monthly logins to a Partner Community or the record limit for Data.com list users are usage-based entitlements.

• Company A purchases 50 monthly logins for a Partner Community, and on January 15 that org has a pool of 50 logins. Each time someone logs in, one login is used. On February 15, no matter how many were used in the previous month, the pool is refreshed and 50 logins are available through March 14.