What are Profiles in Salesforce?

In Salesforce, Profiles are mainly used to control the object level access. These are one of the most important things to create an application. We cannot have any user without profile. In Profile we defines the fields/objects permissions and also many other permissions. It states what a user can do and access in the org. Salesforce provide some standard Profiles itself which can be used as it is, and also we can create our own Profiles with required set of permissions. It is recommended that, new custom Profiles should be created by cloning of standard Profile.

By profiles we can define the following things:

1. Object CRUDE (create, read, update, delete & edit) Permissions.

2. Field - Level Security (view or edit).

3. Page Layouts for each and every object.

4. Visibility of Tabs.

5. IP addresses Restriction.

6. Login Hours can also be defined.

7. Record Type Permissions.

8. VF pages & Apex classes can also be defined that what should be visible to this profile user.