About accounts on GitHub Enterprise Server
With GitHub Enterprise Server, 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 Enterprise Server.
- User accounts
- Organization accounts
- Enterprise accounts
Every person who uses GitHub Enterprise Server signs in to a user account. An organization account enhances collaboration between multiple users, and the enterprise account for your GitHub Enterprise Server instance 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.
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."
For more information about all the features of organizations, see "About organizations."
Enterprise accounts
Your enterprise account is a collection of all the organizations on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance. You can use your enterprise account to centrally manage policy and billing. Unlike organizations, enterprise accounts cannot directly own resources like repositories, packages, or projects. These resources are owned by organizations within the enterprise account instead. For more information, see "About enterprise accounts."
Further reading
- "Creating a new organization from scratch"
- Organizing people for successful collaboration video in GitHub Resources