Types of GitHub accounts

Your user account is your identity on GitHub. Your user account can be a member of any number of organizations. Organizations can belong to enterprise accounts.

For a full list of features for each GitHub product, see "GitHub's products."

Personal user accounts

Every person who uses GitHub has their own user account, which includes:

  • Unlimited public and private repositories with GitHub Free
  • Unlimited collaborators with GitHub Free
  • Additional features for private repositories with GitHub Pro
  • Ability to invite repository collaborators

Tips:

  • You can use one account for multiple purposes, such as for personal use and business use. We do not recommend creating more than one account. For more information, see "Merging multiple user accounts."
  • User accounts are intended for humans, but you can give one to a robot, such as a continuous integration bot, if necessary.

Enterprise Managed Users

With Enterprise Managed Users, instead of using your personal account, members of an enterprise with managed users are provisioned accounts using the enterprise's identity provider (IdP). Managed users authenticate using their IdP instead of a GitHub.com username and password.

Managed users can only interact with users, repositories, and organizations that are part of their enterprise. Managed users have read-only access to the rest of GitHub.com. For more information, see "About Enterprise Managed Users."

Organization accounts

Organizations are shared accounts where groups of people can collaborate across many projects at once. Owners and administrators can manage member access to the organization's data and projects with sophisticated security and administrative features.

Organizations include:

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."

Enterprise accounts

With enterprise accounts, you can centrally manage policy and billing for multiple GitHub.com organizations. Enterprise accounts are available with GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see "About enterprise accounts."

Further reading

Did this doc help you?Privacy policy

Help us make these docs great!

All GitHub docs are open source. See something that's wrong or unclear? Submit a pull request.

Make a contribution

Or, learn how to contribute.