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Roles in an enterprise

Everyone in an enterprise is a member of the enterprise. To control access to your enterprise's settings and data, you can assign different roles to members of your enterprise.

Enterprise accounts are available with GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Server.

In this article

About roles in an enterprise

Everyone in an enterprise is a member of the enterprise. You can also assign administrative roles to members of your enterprise. Each administrator role maps to business functions and provides permissions to do specific tasks within the enterprise.

Currently, there are two administrative roles available in enterprises: enterprise owners, who can access and manage all settings across the enterprise, and billing managers, who can access and manage only the enterprise's billing settings. Enterprise owners can also see all of the members and outside collaborators for every organization owned by the enterprise.

For more information about adding people to your enterprise, see "Authentication".

Enterprise owner

Enterprise owners have complete control over the enterprise and can take every action, including:

  • Managing administrators
  • organizations the enterprise
  • Managing enterprise settings
  • Enforcing policy across organizations

Enterprise owners cannot access organization settings or content unless they are made an organization owner or given direct access to an organization-owned repository. Similarly, owners of organizations in your enterprise do not have access to the enterprise itself unless you make them enterprise owners.

You can add as many enterprise owners as you'd like to your enterprise. As a best practice, we recommend making only a few people in your company enterprise owners, to reduce the risk to your business.

Enterprise members

Members of organizations owned by your enterprise are also automatically members of the enterprise. Members can collaborate in organizations and may be organization owners, but members cannot access or configure enterprise settings.

People in your enterprise may have different levels of access to the various organizations owned by your enterprise and to repositories within those organizations. You can view the resources that each person has access to. For more information, see "Viewing people in your enterprise."

For more information about organization-level permissions, see "Permission levels for an organization."

People with outside collaborator access to repositories owned by your organization are also listed in your enterprise's People tab, but are not enterprise members and do not have any access to the enterprise. For more information about outside collaborators, see "Permission levels for an organization."