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.

In this article

• Personal user accounts
• Organization accounts
• Enterprise accounts
• Further reading

Personal user accounts

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

• Unlimited public and private repositories 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.

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:

• A free option, GitHub Team for Open Source, with unlimited collaborators on unlimited public repositories

• The option to upgrade to GitHub Team or GitHub Enterprise Cloud for additional features, including private repositories, sophisticated user authentication and management, and escalated support options. For more information, see "GitHub's products."

• 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

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. For more information, see "About enterprise accounts."

Further reading

• "Signing up for a new GitHub account"
• "GitHub's products"
• "Creating a new organization account"