Profiles

Profiles are a way to customize the overall experience of a Salesforce user. Profiles are used to decide the data security by granting object-level permissions and field-level security that decides which fields need to be shown to which specific set of users. Profiles have certain rules or settings that we can set in order to grant or restrict a set of user permissions. The role decides record-level access in Salesforce and the profile decides what users can see in those records, as well as which actions the user can perform.

Different types of profiles

There are two types of profile in Salesforce:

• Standard: Profiles which come with standard CRM when you purchase a new Salesforce organization. You cannot delete these profiles.
• Custom: Custom profiles are profiles that we create by cloning the existing Salesforce standard profiles.

The major difference between both the profiles lies in their applicable permissions and settings; administrative permissions, general user permissions, object-level permissions, and the Password Never Expires setting can't be applied to the standard profile. You can only delete a custom profile when users are not assigned to it.

The following is list of a few important standard profiles available in Salesforce:

It is always best practice to create a new profile by cloning it from a Read Only profile, because a read only profile comes with minimum permissions and it's easy to add or remove such permission.