About organizations

About organizations

Your team can collaborate on GitHub Enterprise Cloud by using an organization account, which serves as a container for your shared work and gives the work a unique name and brand.

Each person that uses GitHub always signs into a personal account, and multiple personal accounts can collaborate on shared projects by joining the same organization account. A subset of these personal accounts can be given the role of organization owner, which allows those people to granularly manage access to the organization's resources using sophisticated security and administrative features. For more information about account types, see Types of GitHub accounts.

You can invite people to join your organization, then give these organization members a variety of roles that grant different levels of access to the organization and its data. For more information, see Roles in an organization. If an organization exceeds 100,000 members, some UI experiences and API functionality may be degraded.

In addition to managing access to the organization itself, you can separately manage access to your organization's repositories, projects, and apps. For more information, see Repository roles for an organization, and Managing programmatic access to your organization.

To simplify access management and enhance collaboration, you can create nested teams that reflect your group's structure, with cascading access permissions and mentions. For more information, see About teams.

You can configure the organization to meet the unique needs of your group by managing settings, such as restricting the types of repositories that members can create. For more information, see Managing organization settings.

To harden your organization's security, you can enforce security requirements and review the organization's audit log. For more information, see Keeping your organization secure.

To learn how to use organizations most effectively, see Best practices for organizations.

About feature availability

All organizations can own an unlimited number of public and private repositories. You can use organizations for free, with GitHub Free, which includes limited features on private repositories. To get the full feature set on private repositories and additional features at the organization level, including SAML single sign-on and improved support coverage, you can upgrade to GitHub Team or GitHub Enterprise Cloud. For more information, see "GitHub’s plans."

Organizations and enterprise accounts

For organizations that belong to an enterprise account, billing is managed at the enterprise account level, and billing settings are not available at the organization level. Enterprise owners can set policy for all organizations in the enterprise account or allow organization owners to set the policy at the organization level. Organization owners cannot change settings enforced for your organization at the enterprise account level. If you have questions about a policy or setting for your organization, contact the owner of your enterprise account.

If you currently use GitHub Enterprise Cloud with a single organization, we encourage you to create an enterprise account. For more information, see Creating an enterprise account.

Enterprise account owners can invite existing organization accounts to join their enterprise. For more information, see "Adding organizations to your enterprise."

Terms of service and data protection for organizations

An entity, such as a company, non-profit, or group, can agree to the Standard Terms of Service or the GitHub Customer Agreement for their organization. For more information, see Upgrading to the GitHub Customer Agreement.