Salesforce Public Groups: Setup Guide
Quick Summary:
Public groups are flexible collections of users, roles, or other groups, used primarily to simplify sharing rules and permission assignment — instead of listing individuals, you reference the group.
What Is a Public Group?
A public group is an arbitrary collection of users, roles (with or without subordinates), and even other groups, created specifically to make sharing and access management easier. Rather than adding 15 individual users to a sharing rule one at a time, you add one group.
How to Create One
Go to Setup → Public Groups and click New.
Name the group clearly (its purpose should be obvious from the name).
Add members — individual users, roles, roles and subordinates, or other public groups.
Save, then reference this group anywhere sharing or access needs to be granted — sharing rules, folder permissions, and more.
A Real-World Example
A company wants its entire customer success team — spread across three different roles in the hierarchy — to have read access to a specific set of Account records that don't naturally fall under their role-based visibility. A single public group containing all three roles, referenced in one sharing rule, handles this cleanly rather than requiring three separate sharing rules.
💡 Pro Tip
Name groups by their actual purpose ("CS Team - Enterprise Accounts Access") rather than something generic — six months later, a clearly-named group is far easier to audit and maintain than one with an ambiguous name nobody remembers the reasoning behind.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a public group contain other public groups?
Yes, groups can be nested within groups, letting you build broader groups from smaller, more specific ones without duplicating membership management.
What\'s the difference between a public group and a role?
A role defines a position in the org hierarchy (affecting data visibility via role-based sharing); a public group is a flexible, arbitrary collection of users, roles, or other groups for sharing purposes, independent of the org chart.
Can public groups be used in sharing rules?
Yes, this is one of their primary purposes — sharing rules commonly grant access to a public group rather than listing individual users.
Can external community users be included in a public group?
Yes, if your org uses Experience Cloud, external users can be added to public groups, letting you extend sharing rules to partners or customers where appropriate.
Is there a limit to how many members a public group can have?
No hard limit tied to member count specifically, though very large groups (thousands of members) can affect sharing recalculation performance.
Can I use a public group in a duplicate rule or validation rule?
Not directly — public groups are primarily a sharing and visibility mechanism; validation and duplicate rules work with field values, not group membership.
Do public groups automatically update when someone\'s role changes?
If the group includes a role (and optionally its subordinates) rather than individual users, membership updates automatically as people move in and out of that role.
Can a public group be used for email distribution?
Not natively as a distribution list, though members could be manually referenced for email sends; public groups are primarily a data-sharing construct, not a communication tool.
Who can create and manage public groups?
Users with the "Manage Public List Views" or broader administrative permissions can typically create and edit public groups, depending on the specific permission configuration.
Can public groups be used in Chatter group membership?
Public groups (the sharing construct) and Chatter Groups (the collaboration feature) are different things despite similar naming — they aren't directly interchangeable, though both serve grouping purposes in their respective contexts.