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If you are like me you may have come across some of these terms, “Salesforce Sites user,” “Customer Portal User,” “Authenticated Website User,” “High Volume Portal user” and been rather confused. Actually, as far as I can tell, the evolution of these terms is fairly straightforward and revolves around access and pricing.

First, you have the Customer portal user used for support related login information. Then, when Salesforce released Sites they used the Customer portal account system to provision accounts for Sites. This led to some overlap in names. For example, in order to get Salesforce Sites working you need to first enable accounts with the Customer Portal. With the Winter ’10 release Salesforce formally released a high volume portal user in order to allow different pricing models for high volume customers (including a per-login pricing model). Because this was confusing, in Spring ’10 released another “Authenticated Website User” which was exactly the same as the high volume portal user but had a name that wasn’t obviously connected to the customer portal.

Make sense?

Perhaps not, but what you need to know is that, for all practical purposes:

Salesforce Sites user = Authenticated website user = High volume portal user

Each is also a portal user with more limited capabilities than your standard portal user. You can read about those limitations here.

That said, authenticated website users and high volume portal user exist as separate profiles so they can be customized to have different levels of access. The intended usage relates to the aforementioned history, with portal users most likely requiring more access than your average authenticated user (although this depends entirely on your application). As for pricing, this does not appear to be standardized.

Keep in mind that you also can have a Sites guest and there is also a guest profile for every non-user that accesses your site. So at least in my lexicon Sites User != Sites Guest, since the guest does not have a unique account.