Your team can collaborate on GitHub by using an organization account. Each person that uses GitHub signs into a user account. Multiple user accounts can collaborate on shared projects by joining the same organization account, which owns the repositories. A subset of these user 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.
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
You can use organizations for free, with GitHub Free, which includes unlimited collaborators on unlimited public repositories with full features, and unlimited private repositories with limited features.
For additional features, including sophisticated user authentication and management, 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."
Organizations and enterprise accounts
Enterprise accounts allow owners to centrally manage policy and billing for multiple GitHub.com organizations.
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.
Enterprise accounts are available with GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see "About enterprise accounts."
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."
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."