Your team can collaborate on GitHub by using an organization account. Each person that uses GitHub signs into a personal account. Multiple personal accounts can collaborate on shared projects by joining the same organization account, which owns the repositories. 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."
Organizations include:
- Unlimited membership with a variety of roles that grant different levels of access to the organization and its data
- The ability to give members a range of access permissions to your organization's repositories
- Nested teams that reflect your company or group's structure with cascading access permissions and mentions
- The ability for organization owners to view members' two-factor authentication (2FA) status
- The option to require all organization members to use two-factor authentication
- The ability to create and administer classrooms with GitHub Classroom
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 products."
If you use GitHub Enterprise Cloud, you have the option to purchase a license for GitHub Advanced Security and use the features on private repositories. For more information, see "About GitHub Advanced Security."
For more information about how you can try GitHub Enterprise Cloud for free, see "Setting up a trial of GitHub Enterprise Cloud."
Projects maintained and managed by one sole organization owner can easily become inaccessible if the organization owner is unreachable. We recommend an organization have at least two people with owner permissions to ensure no one will lose access to a project. For more information, see "Maintaining ownership continuity for your organization."
Organizations and enterprise accounts
Enterprise accounts are a feature of GitHub Enterprise Cloud that allow owners to centrally manage policy and billing for multiple organizations. For more information, see the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation.
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 Corporate Terms of Service for their organization. For more information, see "Upgrading to the Corporate Terms of Service."