An enterprise account is the central point of administration for your business on GitHub. It brings together administrative tools for access management, policies, billing, and more. Enterprise administrators can set up features and policies efficiently at scale before deploying them across the business.
This guide provides an overview of the major administrative features included in an enterprise account. By understanding the tools at your disposal, you will be able to adapt GitHub to your unique needs, set your business up for future scaling, and enable teams to focus on strategic work.
Users
Your enterprise contains all the users who need to access any part of your company's resources on GitHub. Users can be grouped into teams and given access to organizations.
On GitHub Enterprise Server, you have a range of options for creating and authenticating user accounts, including built-in accounts or provisioning accounts from an identity provider.
By default, most users have a non-administrative role in your enterprise, which means they have little reason to interact with the enterprise account itself. However, you can change this by granting enterprise roles that provide access to specific settings.
Organizations
An enterprise account may contain one or more organizations. Like an enterprise account, an organization account contains its own administrative features such as audit logs, policies, and teams.
An organization also contains the places where non-admins typically do their work, such as repositories, discussions, and projects. The users in an organization are the people who need to access these places to do their jobs.
Generally, you can govern organizations consistently from your enterprise account. To allow for more tailored and granular administration, you can also delegate some decisions, such as policy settings, to organization administrators.
Repositories
Repositories host files such as your company's source code or internal documentation. They are where developers typically do their work, and they contain their own features and administration options that need to live closer to the code, such as GitHub Actions workflows.
Repositories are owned by organizations and are not directly accessible under the enterprise account.
Apps
GitHub Apps are a secure way to manage automations across your enterprise. A GitHub App is a dedicated identity that provides scoped tokens to your external scripts and workflows, allowing you to automate processes and integrate with other platforms.
In your enterprise account, you can define app registrations to automate a process consistently across organizations.
Users can also authorize GitHub Apps to use their GitHub account and data in other applications—for example, to use their GitHub account to sign in to an IDE or connect a CI provider to your repositories.