Connect Claude to Salesforce: plugin, MCP or connector

Since Claudeforce was announced, the most common question is no longer whether Claude can work with Salesforce but how to wire it up. There are three routes, with different requirements and different security postures. This guide puts them side by side, walks through the setup and lists the checks worth doing before anyone in your company connects anything.

The plugin is the packaged route for sellers. The hosted MCP server is the general-purpose route: it exposes your org to Claude through the Model Context Protocol, the open standard Claude uses to talk to other systems. Third-party connectors are the fallback when neither fits.

Five steps, split between your Salesforce admin and an Owner of your Claude organisation. First, the Salesforce admin requests access to the plugin through AgentExchange and waits for the acceptance email. Second, a Claude Owner decides in the organisation settings which groups get the plugin: installed by default, available to install or required.

Third, the Salesforce admin enables the Salesforce MCP server and hands over the consumer key and consumer secret of the external client app. Fourth, the Claude Owner adds the "Salesforce (Beta)" connector with those two values. Fifth, every user signs in to Salesforce with their own account the first time they open the plugin. From then on Claude reads only what that user can read, and by default asks for confirmation before writing a change.

The hosted MCP server is the same building block the plugin uses, without the sales skills on top. A Salesforce admin enables it and creates the external client app that authorises Claude; in Claude it is added as a custom connector, and each user signs in with their own Salesforce account.

This is the route for service teams, operations, admins and developers, and for orgs that are not on the latest Sales Cloud edition. You get the data and the actions, not the ready-made workflows: what Claude does with them depends on how your people ask, or on skills you write yourselves.

Exactly what the signed-in user can. That sounds reassuring and is the main risk: a profile that is too wide today becomes something an assistant reads, summarises and acts on tomorrow. Validation rules, Flows and triggers apply to Claude's writes just as they do to manual edits, so overlapping automations you tolerate now turn into visible errors.

Claude Tag in Slack works differently: its Salesforce connection uses a dedicated integration user rather than each person's access. Two different postures, worth deciding on deliberately rather than discovering later.

Today the connection itself has no separate Salesforce price: on Enterprise Edition and above hosted MCP access needs no extra SKU and calls draw on your existing API limits. You pay for the Claude plan, and, for the plugin, you need the Sales Cloud edition Salesforce requires.

That is about to change. Salesforce has announced that successful calls by registered AI agents to production orgs, over MCP or API, will be billed in Flex Credits as Headless Platform Interactions. The rate is not published yet; we explain what is known in the guide to Headless Platform Interactions.

If your sellers are the audience and your org is on the latest Sales Cloud edition, request the plugin: the 37 skills save weeks of prompt-writing. If the audience is anyone else, or you are on an older edition from Enterprise up, connect the hosted MCP server. Use a third-party connector only when you need several systems behind one connection, and read what access the vendor holds before signing.

Three checks, in this order. A permission review: who sees what and who can change what, starting from the profiles with the widest access. A sandbox trial: connect Claude to a sandbox first and run the questions your team will actually ask. A rule on identities: decide who may connect Claude to Salesforce and with which user, so each team does not set up its own connection.

If you want this done for you, describe your org and the team that will use Claude: within one business day you get a written, fixed-price quote for the permission review and the connection.