---
title: Roles and permissions
description: How organization, workspace, and credential roles work together — and how they inherit.
pageType: reference
---

import { Callout } from 'fumadocs-ui/components/callout'
import { Video } from '@/components/ui/video'

Access in Sim is organized into three nested levels — your **organization**, the **workspaces** inside it, and the **credentials** (connected accounts and secrets) inside those. Each level has its own roles, and roles **inherit downward**: an admin at one level is automatically an admin at the level below. Inheritance only ever *adds* access — it never takes access away from someone who already has it.

## How roles inherit

Each level has its own set of roles:

| Level | Roles |
|-------|-------|
| **Organization** | Owner, Admin, Member |
| **Workspace** | Read, Write, Admin |
| **Credentials** (shared connections and secrets) | Member, Admin |

Higher roles flow down automatically:

- An organization **Owner or Admin** is automatically an **Admin of every workspace** in the organization — no per-workspace invite required.
- A workspace **Admin** is automatically an **Admin of every shared credential** in that workspace — OAuth connections, service accounts, and workspace secrets.

Put together, an organization Owner or Admin can administer every workspace and every shared credential in the organization, top to bottom.

Inherited roles are **automatic and locked**. In member lists they show greyed out with a short tooltip saying where the role comes from (for example, *"Organization admins are automatically workspace admins"*), and they can't be lowered there — you change them at the level they come from.

<Callout type="info">
**Personal secrets are the one exception.** A user's personal environment variables stay private to them and are never shared or inherited — not by workspace Admins, not by organization Owners or Admins, not by anyone.
</Callout>

## Workspaces and Organizations

Sim has two kinds of workspaces:

- **Personal workspaces** live under your individual account. The number you can create depends on your plan.
- **Shared (organization) workspaces** live under an organization and are available on Team and Enterprise plans. Any organization Owner or Admin can create them. Internal members invited to a shared workspace join the organization and count toward your seat total. Existing Sim users who already belong to another organization can be added as external workspace members instead, giving them access to the workspace without adding them to your organization roster or using one of your seats.

### Workspace Limits by Plan

| Plan | Personal Workspaces | Shared Workspaces |
|------|---------------------|-------------------|
| **Free** | 1 | — |
| **Pro** | Up to 3 | — |
| **Max** | Up to 10 | — |
| **Team / Enterprise** | — | Unlimited (Owners and Admins) |

On Team and Enterprise plans, every workspace you create belongs to the organization. Organization Owners and Admins can create unlimited shared workspaces; organization Members cannot create workspaces. Personal workspaces created before joining the organization remain accessible. Enterprise invites require an available seat at invite time; on Team plans, a seat is added automatically when the invitee accepts.

<Callout type="info">
  When a Team or Enterprise subscription is cancelled or downgraded, existing shared workspaces stay accessible to current members. New invitations are blocked until the organization is upgraded again.
</Callout>

## How to Invite Someone to a Workspace

<div className="mx-auto w-full overflow-hidden rounded-lg">
  <Video src="invitations.mp4" width={700} height={450} />
</div>

## Workspace Permission Levels

When inviting someone to a workspace, you can assign one of three permission levels:

| Permission | What They Can Do |
|------------|------------------|
| **Read** | View workflows, see execution results, but cannot make any changes |
| **Write** | Create and edit workflows, run workflows, manage environment variables |
| **Admin** | Everything Write can do, plus invite/remove users and manage workspace settings |

## Internal Members vs External Workspace Members

Workspace permissions are separate from organization membership:

- **Internal organization members** belong to your organization, appear in the organization roster, and count toward your seat total. Invite new teammates this way when they should be part of your company or team in Sim.
- **External workspace members** have access only to the workspace they are invited to. They keep their own organization membership, do not appear in your organization roster, and do not count toward your organization's seats. Use external access for clients, partners, contractors, or collaborators who already use Sim in another organization.

External workspace members still receive a workspace permission level — Read, Write, or Admin — and that permission controls what they can do inside the workspace.

## What Each Permission Level Can Do

Here's a detailed breakdown of what users can do with each permission level:

### Read Permission

**What they can do:**
- View all workflows in the workspace
- See workflow execution results and logs
- Browse workflow configurations and settings
- View environment variables (but not edit them)

**What they cannot do:**
- Create, edit, or delete workflows
- Run or deploy workflows
- Change any workspace settings
- Invite other users

### Write Permission

**What they can do:**
- Everything Read users can do, plus:
- Create, edit, and delete workflows
- Run and deploy workflows
- Add, edit, and delete workspace environment variables
- Use all available tools and integrations
- Collaborate in real-time on workflow editing

**What they cannot do:**
- Invite or remove users from the workspace
- Change workspace settings
- Delete the workspace

### Admin Permission

**What they can do:**
- Everything Write users can do, plus:
- Invite new users to the workspace with any permission level
- Remove users from the workspace
- Manage workspace settings and integrations
- Administer every shared credential in the workspace (OAuth connections, service accounts, and workspace secrets)
- Delete workflows created by other users
- Delete the workspace

**What they cannot do:**
- Change a role that's inherited from a higher level — an organization admin's workspace role, or the owner's, is locked and managed where it comes from

---

## Workspace Owner

Every workspace has one **Owner** — usually the person who created it. The Owner is simply an Admin whose role is fixed: in the member list it shows as a locked **Admin** (tooltip *"Workspace owner"*), so it can't be lowered. An Owner has no abilities a regular Admin lacks.

Any Admin — whether invited directly or an admin by way of their organization role — can manage members and settings and delete the workspace. On a shared workspace an Admin can also remove the Owner; ownership then passes to the organization's owner, so the workspace always has one. (The organization's owner is the one account that can't be removed this way — they're the final fallback.) On your personal workspace you are the Owner and can't be removed.

---

## Common Scenarios

### Adding a New Developer to Your Team
1. **Organization level**: Invite them as an **Organization Member**
2. **Workspace level**: Give them **Write** permission so they can create and edit workflows

### Adding a Project Manager
1. **Organization level**: Invite them as an **Organization Member** 
2. **Workspace level**: Give them **Admin** permission so they can manage the team and see everything

### Adding a Stakeholder or Client
1. **Organization level**: If they should not join your organization, add them as an **External workspace member**
2. **Workspace level**: Give them **Read** permission so they can see progress but not make changes

---

## Environment Variables

Users can create two types of environment variables:

### Personal Environment Variables
- Only visible to the individual user, and never shared or inherited — not even by workspace or organization admins
- Available in all workflows they run
- Managed in **Settings**, then go to **Secrets**

### Workspace Environment Variables
- **Read**: see variable names (the values stay hidden unless you're an admin of that secret)
- **Write**: add new variables, and edit or delete ones you created
- **Admin**: add, edit, delete, and view the values of any workspace variable
- Workspace variables are a kind of workspace credential, so they follow the [Credential Access](#credential-access) rules below — workspace Admins are admins of all of them
- Available to all workspace members. If a workspace variable and a personal variable share the same name, the **workspace** value wins when a workflow runs

---

## Credential Access

Workspace credentials — OAuth connections, service accounts, and workspace environment variables — have two roles of their own:

- **Credential Member**: can use the credential in workflows.
- **Credential Admin**: can use it and also edit, delete, and share it.

These roles follow your workspace role:

- **Workspace Admins are automatically Credential Admins** of every shared credential in the workspace (OAuth connections, service accounts, and workspace environment variables). Because organization Owners and Admins are workspace Admins everywhere, they are Credential Admins too. These automatic roles are fixed — they show greyed out with a tooltip in the credential's member list and cannot be changed.
- **Read and Write members are Credential Members** by default — they can use shared credentials but cannot edit, delete, or share them unless someone makes them a Credential Admin (you are always an admin of credentials you create).
- **Personal environment variables** are the exception: they stay private to their owner and are never shared with workspace admins.

<Callout type="info">
  A Credential Admin can both use and manage a credential, so a workspace Admin can run workflows that use any shared OAuth connection in the workspace — including one another member added.
</Callout>

---

## Organization Roles

An organization has three roles: **Owner**, **Admin**, and **Member**.

### Organization Owner
**What they can do:**
- Everything an Admin can do
- Transfer organization ownership to another user
- Only one Owner exists per organization

### Organization Admin
**What they can do:**
- Invite and remove team members from the organization
- Create new shared workspaces under the organization
- Manage billing, seat count, and subscription settings
- Access every shared workspace in the organization as a workspace Admin automatically (no per-workspace invite), including administering the credentials inside them
- Promote members to Admin or demote Admins to Member

<Callout type="info">
  Owners and Admins have the same day-to-day permissions. The only action reserved for the Owner is transferring ownership.
</Callout>

### Organization Member
**What they can do:**
- Access shared workspaces they've been specifically invited to
- View the list of organization members
- Cannot invite new people, create shared workspaces, or manage organization settings

import { FAQ } from '@/components/ui/faq'

<FAQ items={[
  { question: "What is the difference between organization roles and workspace permissions?", answer: "Organization roles (Owner, Admin, or Member) control who can manage the organization itself, including inviting people, creating shared workspaces, and handling billing. Workspace permissions (Read, Write, Admin) control what a user can do within a specific workspace, such as viewing, editing, or managing workflows. Internal members need both an organization role and a workspace permission to work within a shared workspace. External workspace members do not have an organization role in your org; they only have workspace-level access." },
  { question: "What happens to my shared workspaces if I cancel or downgrade my Team plan?", answer: "Existing shared workspaces remain accessible to current members, but new invitations are disabled until you upgrade back to a Team or Enterprise plan. No workspaces or members are deleted — the organization is simply dormant until billing is re-enabled." },
  { question: "Can I restrict which integrations or model providers a team member can use?", answer: "Yes, on Enterprise-entitled organizations. Any organization owner or admin can create permission groups with fine-grained controls, including restricting allowed integrations and allowed model providers to specific lists. You can also disable access to MCP tools, custom tools, skills, and various platform features like the knowledge base, API keys, or Copilot on a per-group basis. Permission groups are scoped to the organization and can govern either all workspaces or a specific subset — a user can belong to multiple groups but is governed by exactly one group in any given workspace." },
  { question: "What happens when a personal environment variable has the same name as a workspace variable?", answer: "The workspace variable wins. When a workflow runs, the resolver checks workspace variables first and falls back to a personal variable only when no workspace variable shares that name. This keeps shared, team-managed values authoritative in production workflows." },
  { question: "Can an Admin remove the workspace owner?", answer: "On a shared (organization) workspace, yes — any Admin can remove the workspace Owner, and ownership passes to the organization's owner so the workspace always has one. The organization's owner is the single account that can't be removed this way, since they're the final fallback. On your personal workspace you are the Owner and can't remove yourself. The Owner is not a higher permission tier than Admin: every Admin — including those who inherit the role from their organization — can manage members and settings and delete the workspace." },
  { question: "Who can manage a workspace's credentials and secrets?", answer: "Workspace Admins are automatically Credential Admins of the workspace's shared credentials — OAuth connections, service accounts, and workspace environment variables — so they can use, edit, delete, and share them, and run workflows that rely on them. Organization Owners and Admins get this too because they are workspace Admins everywhere. Read and Write members get use-only access to shared credentials unless they are explicitly made a Credential Admin. Personal environment variables are never shared; they stay private to their owner." },
  { question: "What are permission groups and how do they work?", answer: "Permission groups are an Enterprise access control feature that lets organization owners and admins define granular restrictions beyond the standard Read/Write/Admin roles. The organization's default group is org-wide; every other group targets specific workspaces and, by default, governs all members of those workspaces (including external members) — add members to restrict it to specific people. A user is governed by one group per workspace: a group they're an explicit member of takes precedence over an all-members group (one with no members) on that workspace, which takes precedence over the organization's default group. A permission group can hide UI sections (like trace spans, knowledge base, API keys, or deployment options), disable features (MCP tools, custom tools, skills, invitations), and restrict which integrations and model providers its members can access. Only one group per organization can be the default; it ignores members and governs everyone not covered by a workspace group, including external members. Restrictions are enforced based on the organization that owns the workflow's workspace, not on which workspace you're currently viewing." },
  { question: "How should I set up permissions for a new team member?", answer: "Start with the lowest permission level they need. Invite teammates to the organization as Members, then add them to the relevant workspace with Read permission if they only need visibility, Write if they need to create and run workflows, or Admin if they need to manage the workspace and its users. For clients, partners, or users who already belong to another Sim organization, use external workspace access so they can collaborate without joining your organization or consuming a seat." },
]} />