Types of GitHub accounts

Accounts on GitHub allow you to organize and control access to code.

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About accounts on GitHub

With GitHub, you can store and collaborate on code. Accounts allow you to organize and control access to that code. There are three types of accounts on GitHub.

  • User accounts
  • Organization accounts
  • Enterprise accounts

Every person who uses GitHub signs in to a user account. An organization account enhances collaboration between multiple users, and an enterprise account allows central management of multiple organizations.

User accounts

Every person who uses GitHub signs in to a user account. Your user account is your identity on GitHub and has a username and profile. For example, see @octocat's profile.

Your user account can own resources such as repositories, packages, and projects. Any time you take any action on GitHub, such as creating an issue or reviewing a pull request, the action is attributed to your user account.

User accounts are intended for humans, but you can create accounts to automate activity on GitHub. This type of account is called a machine user. For example, you can create a machine user account to automate continuous integration (CI) workflows.

There are two types of user account:

Personal accounts

If you signed up for your own account on GitHub.com, you are using a personal account.

Each personal account uses either GitHub Free or GitHub Pro. All personal accounts can own an unlimited number of public and private repositories, with an unlimited number of collaborators on those repositories. If you use GitHub Free, private repositories owned by your personal account have a limited feature set. You can upgrade to GitHub Pro to get a full feature set for private repositories. For more information, see "GitHub’s plans."

Many people use one personal account for all their work on GitHub.com, including both open source projects and paid employment. If you're currently using more than one personal account that you created for yourself, we suggest combining the accounts. For more information, see "Merging multiple personal accounts."

Even if you're a member of an organization that uses SAML single sign-on, you will still sign in to your own personal account on GitHub.com, and that personal account will be linked to your identity in your organization's identity provider (IdP). For more information, see "About authentication with SAML single sign-on" in the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation.

Managed user accounts

If your account was created for you by an enterprise on GitHub Enterprise Cloud, you are using a managed user account.

As a managed user account:

  • Some of your account details and settings are managed by your enterprise.
  • You must sign in to your managed user account to access organizations and repositories owned by the enterprise.
  • You can create your own private repositories, but you cannot create public content or contribute to repositories outside the enterprise.

Organization accounts

Organizations are shared accounts where a large number of people can collaborate across many projects at once.

Like user accounts, organizations can own resources such as repositories, packages, and projects. However, you cannot sign in to an organization. Instead, each person signs in to their user account, and any actions the person takes on organization resources are attributed to their user account. Each user can be a member of multiple organizations.

The users within an organization can be given different roles in the organization, which grant different levels of access to the organization and its data. All members can collaborate with each other in repositories and projects, but only organization owners and security managers can manage the settings for the organization and control access to the organization's data with sophisticated security and administrative features. For more information, see "Roles in an organization" and "Keeping your organization secure."

You can also create nested sub-groups of organization members called teams, to reflect your group's structure and simplify access management. For more information, see "About teams."

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 plans."

For more information about how you can try GitHub Enterprise Cloud for free, see "Setting up a trial of GitHub Enterprise Cloud."

For more information about all the features of organizations, see "About organizations."

Enterprise accounts

GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Server include enterprise accounts, which allow administrators to centrally manage policy and billing for multiple organizations and enable innersourcing between the organizations. For more information, see "About enterprise accounts" in the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation.

Further reading