What's the best partner portal for Salesforce? (Besides Experience Cloud or Partner Cloud obviously)

The best partner portal for Salesforce is the one that's best at integrating with your SF CRM. Many partner portal options out there will integrate with Salesforce – but only one actually, really plugs in your CRM data into the portal in an accurate, reliable and easy-to-manage way – that's Magentrix PRM.

So, the first thing that needs to be considered if you're looking for a third-party partner portal software that integrates with Salesforce, is exactly that – take a look at the way the portal is actually connected to Salesforce.

What I mean is assess the integration itself and ask the portal vendor questions about how they built it and what level of precision it's capable of delivering.

There are 3 ways to integrate a CRM to another application:

• Direct Querying
  
  • Pros: Data is always up-to-date because it’s coming straight from the source. No syncing needed.
  • Cons: Performance is usually bad. Every click sends a live request to Salesforce, which slows things down and eats up your API limits like a snack. Also breaks the moment connectivity drops.
  • Good for: Lightweight, infrequent lookups where speed doesn’t matter.
  • Not good for: Portals, dashboards, anything requiring speed, scale, or actual reliability.
  • Real-world analogy: It’s like going to the DMV in person every time you need information, instead of storing it somewhere useful.
• Field-mapping: TL;DR: You manually connect individual fields between systems.
  
  • Pros: Works fine for simple use cases. Lots of legacy systems rely on it.
  • Cons: Super brittle. Anytime Salesforce changes – like adding a new field, changing picklist values, or tweaking layouts – you have to manually update the mapping. Otherwise, things break quietly and sneakily. High maintenance: You’ll spend more time fixing sync errors than doing actual work.
  • Good for: Very basic integrations with no custom objects, limited schema changes, and an ops team with nothing better to do.
  • Not good for: Mature CRM environments that evolve constantly (especially enterprise organizations)
• Data-mirroring: TL;DR: The app maintains a complete, synced copy of Salesforce’s data and structure. It’s like Salesforce has a twin that always knows what it knows.
  
  • Pros: Syncs entire objects, fields, relationships, and schema. Automatic, real-time updates. No need to reconfigure every time something changes. Scales beautifully.
  • Reliable: If Salesforce changes, the mirror updates with it. No scrambling to keep up.
  • Good for: Mid-market, and enterprise organizations, and higher
  • Not good for: Not really applicable.

Keep in mind that 2 out of 3 of the ways are very faulty - direct querying and field-mapping. And most partner portal software vendors use one of the faulty integration methods to connect to your SF – that would be the field-mapping method.

Why don't all of them use the mirroring method if it's so much better, you ask? (it's only logical right) Our guess is because it's way harder to build it that way.

Field-mapping: The CRM-to-PRM integration that just keeps breaking your portal 😒

Many partner portals rely on field mapping to connect with Salesforce. It works... until it doesn’t. Every schema change in Salesforce (a new field, picklist value, or layout tweak) becomes a potential breakage point.

Maintenance piles up. Data falls out of sync. What looked simple quickly becomes fragile and time-consuming to manage.

And when things break, partners notice. Incomplete records, missing data, and inconsistent access erode trust fast.

And the more complex your Salesforce setup becomes, the more brittle field-mapping starts to look and the more partner operations challenges you'll face.

Why a CRM data-mirroring integration works best for partner portal software

Data mirroring eliminates these problems by syncing your portal with Salesforce at the object and schema level – not just field by field.

This means your portal reflects Salesforce automatically: every update, rule, and structure stays aligned without manual upkeep.

Our data mirroring approach is built for modern Salesforce environments – custom fields, complex relationships, validation rules and all.

It scales as your CRM evolves, without constant reconfiguration. No shortcuts, no syncing hacks, no data guesswork.

What does this mean for your channel operations?

↳ Your portal becomes a true extension of your CRM, not a loosely connected second system.

↳ Partners see accurate, up-to-date data without the noise.

↳ Your ops team doesn’t get buried in integration tickets.

Everyone wins.

Avoid deal registration errors in the portal – by using a portal that mirrors your CRM data

Deal registration is often the first feature partners use – and the first to break under weak integration.

If Salesforce and the portal aren’t fully in sync, submissions fail. Approvals stall. Sales teams don’t get alerted. And partners give up trying to register deals in the portal.

Without clean, mirrored data, even basic partner workflows start to unravel.

Want to know how to assess a PRM's CRM integration (the single most important thing in a partner portal to make it function well)?

CRM integration isn’t just another feature in a partner portal – it’s the foundation everything else depends on. If it’s weak, workflows break. If it’s strong, partners actually use the portal (and so does your internal channel team)

We’ve put together a comprehensive guide to help you assess how well a PRM integrates with Salesforce, what to look for, and what to avoid.

Check out our CRM-to-PRM Integration Guide to learn:

• What a strong integration actually looks like under the hood
• Red flags that signal future maintenance nightmares
• How to evaluate syncing methods (field-mapping vs. data mirroring)
• Questions to ask any PRM vendor before you commit

In other words: it’ll save you from buying something you’ll regret in six months.