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Roles in an enterprise

In this article

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.

About roles in an enterprise

All users that are part of your enterprise have one of the following roles:

  • Enterprise owner
  • Enterprise member

For more information about adding people to your enterprise, see "Identity and access management".

Enterprise owners

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

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

Enterprise owners do not have access to organization settings or content by default. To gain access, enterprise owners can join any organization owned by their enterprise. For more information, see "Managing your role in an organization owned by your enterprise."

Owners of organizations in your enterprise do not have access to the enterprise itself unless you make them enterprise owners.

Even if an enterprise owner has a role in multiple organizations, they will consume a single license. As a best practice, we recommend making only a few people in your company enterprise owners, to reduce the risk to your business. For more information about accounts that consume a license for your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, see "About per-user pricing."

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.

Enterprise members have access to all repositories with the "internal" visibility that are owned by any organization within the enterprise. For more information about internal repositories, see "About repositories."

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."

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 "Roles in an organization."