Workspaces
A workspace is your organization's home in Plane. It holds your people, your projects, your documentation, and your reporting, all under one roof. When you sign in to Plane, you are always working inside a workspace.
Almost everything in Plane belongs to a workspace: members and their roles, projects and their work items, the wiki, dashboards, integrations, billing, and settings.
A workspace is the boundary for access, for reporting, and for billing.
How work is organized
Plane organizes work in four levels. Understanding them makes every other decision easier.
| Level | What it represents |
|---|---|
| Workspace | Your organization's environment in Plane |
| Teamspace | A stable team or function that works across several projects |
| Project | A product area, outcome, or continuing stream of work |
| Work item | A single task or other unit of work |
A workspace contains projects. A project contains work items. Teamspaces sit alongside projects and bring together a team with the projects it works in. The work items and cycles stay in their projects.
Work items are where the actual work is tracked. Everything above them exists to give that work structure, ownership, and context.
What lives at the workspace level
Some things belong to a single project, and some belong to the whole workspace. Workspace-level features let you see and manage work across every project at once.
- People and access. Members, roles, invitations, and single sign-on and group syncing.
- Cross-project planning. Teamspaces and initiatives connect work that spans several projects.
- Knowledge. The wiki holds documentation that applies across the company, while project pages hold project-specific context.
- Reporting. Workspace views, dashboards, and analytics aggregate work from many projects.
- Configuration. Workspace settings, feature toggles, integrations, imports and exports, webhooks, and API tokens.
- Billing. Your plan and seats are managed per workspace.
Anything scoped to a single project, like that project's work items, cycles, and modules, lives inside the project instead.
One workspace or several
Most organizations should use one workspace. A single workspace keeps members, projects, documentation, and reporting connected, which is what makes cross-project planning and company-wide reporting possible. Splitting a company across several workspaces breaks those connections: work items cannot be shared between workspaces, reporting cannot span them, and members must be invited and managed separately in each.
Create a second workspace only when you need a genuine boundary, for example:
- A separate legal entity or an independently managed business.
- A strict access boundary where no overlap is acceptable.
- A clearly separate customer or client environment.
If your goal is to give a team its own space, a teamspace or a project is almost always the better answer. If your goal is to restrict who sees what, project visibility and roles handle that inside one workspace.
You can belong to as many workspaces as you need, and you can switch between them at any time.
Who manages a workspace
Access in a workspace is set by each member's role. Roles determine what someone can see and change, both across the workspace and within individual projects.
- Owners and admins manage workspace settings, members, features, and billing.
- Members do the day-to-day work: creating and updating work items and pages in the projects they belong to.
- Guests get limited, project-scoped access, which suits contractors, clients, and other external collaborators.
Workspace roles and project roles are separate, so someone can be a regular member of the workspace and still be an admin of a specific project. See Roles and permissions for the full picture.
Enabling workspace features
Not every feature is switched on in a new workspace. Two things determine whether a feature is available:
- Your plan. Some features are included only on certain plans. If your plan does not include a feature, Plane shows an upgrade prompt in place of it.
- A workspace toggle. Many features stay off until an owner or admin turns them on in workspace settings, even when your plan includes them. This is deliberate: it lets you adopt features when your team is ready instead of all at once.
So if you cannot find a feature, check both: whether your plan includes it, and whether an admin has enabled it. See Workspace features for the full list of toggles and where to find them.
Getting started
If you are setting up a new workspace, a good order is:
- Create the workspace and set its name, URL, and timezone. See Create and manage a workspace.
- Decide the structure before inviting everyone: which projects you need, and whether any teams need teamspaces.
- Invite your team with the right roles, keeping admin access limited. See Members and invitations.
- Import existing work from your current tool, bringing across only what is still active.
- Enable the features your team needs, and add more as real needs appear rather than all at once.