Teams in an enterprise

Learn how teams simplify administration of user access, licensing, and communication.

In this article

What are teams?

Teams are groups of users in an enterprise or organization. By creating teams, you can manage users at scale and simplify access, licensing, and communication. For example, you could create an auditor team for users who need access to audit logs, or a Copilot team for users who receive Copilot licenses.

Administrators can create teams in an enterprise account or in organizations within an enterprise.

  • Enterprise teams are managed by enterprise owners and can include users from across the enterprise and its organizations. Currently, enterprise teams are used to manage GitHub Copilot licenses for directly assigned users. GitHub plans to expand the capabilities in the near future to include organization and role assignment.
  • Organization teams are managed by organization administrators and can only include members of a single organization. Organization administrators can grant teams access to organization repositories, and organization members can mention teams in issues and discussions or add them as reviewers on pull requests.

Can I manage teams from an identity provider?

If you have integrated GitHub with an identity provider (IdP), you can link teams on GitHub with groups in your IdP. When membership of the IdP group changes, the change is reflected in the GitHub team, allowing you to centralize access management.

The capabilities of this feature depend on whether you use Enterprise Managed Users or personal accounts.

Enterprise Managed Users

You can make changes to IdP groups to manage repository access, add or remove users from organizations, or grant or remove GitHub Copilot licenses. For example, if a new user is added to an IdP group that is linked to a team with access to an organization, the user receives access to that organization. For more information, see Managing team memberships with identity provider groups.

This feature is available with both enterprise and organization teams.

Personal accounts

Team synchronization allows you to centrally manage any privileges linked to an organization team, such as repository access and CODEOWNER status. However, team sync cannot be used to add users to organizations where they don't already have access. For more information, see Managing team synchronization for organizations in your enterprise.

Team sync with personal accounts is only available with organization teams, and you must use Entra ID or Okta as an IdP.

What kind of team should I use?

To simplify administration at scale, GitHub recommends using enterprise teams wherever possible. However, you may need to create organization teams if the functionality you need is not covered by enterprise teams. GitHub plans to address some of these limitations in the near future.

Unlike organization teams, enterprise teams currently do not support:

  • Repository or organization access
  • @-mentions of the team name in organizations
  • Team sync if you use GitHub Enterprise Cloud with personal accounts
  • CODEOWNER status
  • Secret teams
  • Nested teams
  • Team maintainers

In addition, enterprise teams are currently limited to 50 teams for a single enterprise and 500 users to each team.

For more information about the capabilities of organization teams, see About organization teams.

Further reading