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Organizations

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About organizations

In this article

Organizations are shared accounts where businesses and open-source projects can collaborate across many projects at once, with sophisticated security and administrative features.

About organizations

Your team can collaborate on GitHub Enterprise Server 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 an unlimited number of 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."

In addition to managing access to the organization itself, you can separately manage access to your organization's repositories, project boards, and apps. For more information, see "Repository roles for an organization", "Project board permissions 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."

Organizations and enterprise accounts

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.