Guide to using Notion’s sharing and permission settings

In this Article

Notion is built to be super collaborative, so there's a number of ways to share the content you create with other people. Our permission levels ensure that they access this content exactly the way you want them to 📣

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There are several different ways you can share the pages and databases you build in Notion with folks inside and outside your workspace. Below is an overview of all the ways to share.

First, here's a quick tour of the Share menu, which can be clicked at the top right of your page. On mobile, click the arrow icon at the top right for the same options.

Guide to using Notion’s sharing and permission settings – Notion Help Center (2)

There are different sections of the share menu, the dropdown on the right indicates their level of access.
Using this above example:
- Everyone at Engineering means everyone in the teamspace has access to this page.
- More people with access are members and guests with access for other reasons, like being in a specific group.
- stephanie@toolsforthought.xyz is an example of a Page Guest who was invited from outside the workspace — she can only view this page.
At the bottom of the share menu, you can Copy link to your clipboard so you can share it with whoever you want. You can control who has access to the page here:
- Invite only
- Anyone with a link in [workspace]
- Anyone in [workspace]
Invite lets you add people both inside or outside your workspace to a page using their email address.
- External folks will be added as guests.
- You can assign both guests and other workspace members a level of access using the dropdown menus:

Guide to using Notion’s sharing and permission settings – Notion Help Center (3)

You can collaborate with other people in Notion by adding them as members to your workspace. These can be your teammates at work, friends, or anyone you want to work with on pages. There are a few ways to share Notion pages with all members of your workspace so you can work together:

Create a page in any default teamspace in your sidebar. Hover over the default teamspace's name and click the + button that appears.
Drag a page to a default teamspace in your sidebar.This automatically shares it with everyone.
From within the Share menu, share a page with all workspace members, or all workspace members with a link to the page.

Note: If you choose to share with Anyone with link, the page may be discoverable to other workspace members in cases including the following:

The page is mentioned in or linked from another page shared more broadly.
The page uses a two-way relation that links to another page shared more broadly.
The page is nested inside another page shared more broadly.

Teamspaces are a dedicated area for every team within your organization or company. Each teamspace has its own members and permission levels, which can be customized by its teamspace owners. Learn more about adding members and assigning permissions in teamspaces →

You can share Notion pages with any teamspace that you are a member of:

Create a page in a teamspace in your sidebar. Hover over the teamspace's name and click the + button that appears.
Drag a page to a teamspace in your sidebar.This automatically shares it with members of that teamspace.

Sometimes you'll want to share a page with only select other members of your workspace — like a meeting doc you share with your manager, or notes for a small project team.

Click Share at the top right of a private page you want to share with these members.
Add the members by typing in their email addresses and clicking Invite. You can set their access levels from the dropdown in the invite window.
- While searching for people, you'll see names under In page or Not in page, indicating if they already have access.

Guide to using Notion’s sharing and permission settings – Notion Help Center (5)

Pages that you share with only a few members but not your entire workspace will show up in the Shared section of your sidebar. Drag them into a teamspace to share them with everyone in that teamspace.
If you have more than 7 pages in the Shared section, you can pick which ones you'd like to keep pinned to the sidebar.

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Tip: In the Shared section pop-up, you can also search for shared pages, sort by Relevance or Last edited, and easily copy page links!

To make it easier to share with commonly-used groups (i.e. your company's engineering team or community team), you can create your own member groups and assign them permission to access pages as units.

Learn more about groups and group permissions here →

Here are quick instructions for group sharing:

Go to Settings & members and you'll see a list of all your members and guests. Click the Groups heading at the top of that list.
Click Create a group, give it a name, and add the members you want
To share a page with a particular group, go to Share at the top right of that page, then click the Invite button. You'll see your groups listed in the invite pop-up that appears:

Guide to using Notion’s sharing and permission settings – Notion Help Center (8)

Tip: Everyone at [workspace name] sets the minimum access level on a page for everyone on your team. To give certain people or groups higher access levels, set the access level for Everyone at [workspace name] to Can view or Can comment.

You can invite people from outside your workspace to join pages as guests. Let's say you want to share a Notion page with an external contractor you've hired. Or perhaps you're the contractor and you want to share a page with a client. This is an ideal solution.

Learn more about guests here →

Quick instructions for sharing with guests:

Click Share at the top right of the Notion page you want to share externally.
Add the members by typing in their email addresses and clicking Invite. You can set their access levels from the dropdown in the invite window.
Whoever you invite this way will receive an email with a link to the page you've invited them to view or edit.
If you want to see all the guests in your workspace and the pages they have permission to access, go to the Members section of Settings & members and go to the Guests tab.
In this same window, you can remove guests from your workspace, change their access levels, or convert them to full members.

Guide to using Notion’s sharing and permission settings – Notion Help Center (10)

To publish a Notion page to the internet or share it with people who don't use Notion, you can turn on Share to the web. Anyone with the link will be able to see it. Learn more about public pages here →

Guide to using Notion’s sharing and permission settings – Notion Help Center (11)

Permission levels

This is where Notion's sharing options get nuanced and granular. For every person or group you share with, you can assign a different level of access. For example, this is helpful if:

You want only a few people to edit a page, while everyone else reads it.
See Also
How to Use Notion for Productivity in 2024: Best Tips & Tricks
You want some pages to only be visible to a specific team.
You only want to collect comments on a piece of writing.

Note: When you invite someone to a page, they can automatically access all of its sub-pages by default. That being said, you can restrict or expand sub-page permissions!

How to edit permissions

Whenever you invite someone to a page, or click on Share, you'll see right-hand dropdown menus next to people or groups that let you select their level of access: Full access, Can edit, Can comment, and Can view.

Full access: People with full access to a page can edit any of the content it contains and share the page with anyone they want using all the mechanisms in this guide.
Can edit: Select this level of access for people or groups who should be able to edit the content on the page, but not share the page.
Can edit content: This permission level is only found on database pages. It allows people or groups to create and edit pages within the database, and edit property values for those pages. However, they will not be able to change the structure of the database and its properties, views, sorts or filters. Learn more about databases here →
Can comment: Select this level of access for people and groups who should only have the ability to comment on a page's content, not actually edit it. They also can't share the page with others.
Can view: People with this level of access can read the content on the page, but not comment on it or edit it. They also can't share the page with others.

Guide to using Notion’s sharing and permission settings – Notion Help Center (13)

How to restrict, expand & restore sub-page permissions

By default, any page that's nested inside a page (a child page) will inherit the same permissions as the page it's nested in (the parent page). But you can assign higher or lower levels of permission for sub-pages to meet your needs.

For example: In the screenshot below, everyone at Acme Inc. has Can comment access to the Engineering Wiki and all its sub-pages. Fig is the only team member who's able to make edits, or share with more people.

In a sub-page such as the "Engineering Guidelines" page, you may want to expand permissions to allow a member, guest, permission group, or the entire workspace to be higher than Can comment. In the permission level dropdown for this example, you would select Can edit or Full access.
- Note that the permission level of "Engineering Guidelines" is determined by the "Engineering Wiki" parent page, but it can be overridden.
In a sub-page, you can restrict permissions to prevent members, guests, permission groups, or the entire workspace from commenting, or from seeing the page at all. In the permission level dropdown for this example, you would select Can comment or No access.
- Note that once access is removed for Everyone at Acme Inc, now the "Backend" sub-page can only be seen and edited by Fig and Lauren. Think of it as a "secret page" 🔮
When you restrict the permission levels of a sub-page, a Restore button will appear at the top of your Share menu. Use it to revert the permissions back to default, and inherit from the parent page.

Tip: You can create "secret pages" that only certain people or groups can see, by setting the permission level of a sub-page to No access for the people or groups you want to hide the page from.

Stop sharing

If you have full access to a page, you can disable sharing with anyone at any time.

The fastest way is to move the page from Workspace or Shared in your sidebar to the Private section. Make sure this is what you really want to do, though, because everyone else will lose access.
Click on Share at the top right of the page, and switch off access for your workspace, individuals, groups, or the public. You can also select Remove from the dropdown next to any of these.
For guests, click Share and then select Remove from the dropdown next to their names. You can also go to Settings & members, scroll down to find the guests you want, click on the dropdown to the right of their names and click the Remove button.

Note: People who do not have any access to a page will not see it in their workspace. It might appear in your sidebar, but not in theirs.

See who's sharing a page

You can tell who else has access to a page because their avatars/profile photos can be seen in the bar at the very top of the page.

An avatar appears faded out if that person is not currently looking at the page.
An avatar appears unfaded if the person is currently on the page.
Hovering over an avatar will show you the person's name, email, and when they were last on the page.
Clicking on an active avatar will jump you to the part of the page where they're reading or typing.
When people are collaborating on the same page at the same time, you'll see their avatars move next to the blocks they are looking at or editing.
Click ••• at the top right of any page and look at the bottom of the menu that pops up. You'll see who last edited the page and when.

Guide to using Notion’s sharing and permission settings – Notion Help Center (16)

Request access

If you don't have access to a page, you'll see No access instead of the page name.

Click this to see a menu where you can leave a message and request access to the page.
- This notifies page creators or page editors. They can choose to accept or deny your access request.

Security settings for sharing

If you have an Enterprise Plan subscription, and you're a Workspace owner, you can prevent content from being shared by turning on certain security settings. Contact sales to learn more about our Enterprise plan.

Go to Settings & members at the top of your left sidebar.
Click Settings in the sidebar of the window that pops up.
Scroll down to the Security & identity section, where you'll these toggle switches:

Guide to using Notion’s sharing and permission settings – Notion Help Center (17)

FAQs

I tried adding a guest to my workspace but they were turned into a member automatically. How can I prevent that?

If your workspace is above the guest limit for your plan, new users that you share content with will be automatically added as a member (instead of as a guest) if they have the same organization email domain.

To allow for a new user with the same organization email domain to be added as a guest, you will need to remove existing guests to fall below your plan limit, upgrade to a plan with a higher limit, or work with our sales team (for eligible customers).

If your workspace is above the guest limit for your plan, you may have the Allowed Email Domains setting turned on. When enabled, this feature allows people with that email domain to join your workspace as a member automatically. You can disable this setting in the Settings tab of Settings & Members in the left sidebar.

I want to share a page with a client, but they don't use Notion.

You can enable Share to the web in the Share menu, and share the URL with them. As long as you keep the Search engine indexing setting disabled (always disabled by default), only people with that exact URL will be able to access the page. They'll be able to view the page, even if they don't have a Notion account. However, they won't be able to make any edits, leave comments, or sort/filter a database.

My Export button is missing, it doesn't appear in any menus.

You may have the Disable Export setting enabled in the Settings tab of Settings & Members in your left sidebar. You'll need to be an admin in your workspace, and on desktop to change this.

Can I limit access to different parts of a database? Can you make it so that some people can see certain database views or properties, but not others?

Unfortunately, database permissions don't get quite that granular yet 😓 It’s a legit use case though, and definitely something we want to support in the future. Stay tuned!

I am an expert in collaborative tools and platforms, particularly Notion, with a deep understanding of its features and functionalities. I have actively used Notion to manage projects, facilitate teamwork, and enhance productivity. My expertise extends to various aspects of Notion's sharing capabilities, permission levels, and nuanced features that make it a powerful tool for collaborative work.

In the provided article, the focus is on explaining how Notion is designed to be highly collaborative, emphasizing the diverse ways users can share content within and outside their workspace. Let's break down the key concepts discussed in the article:

Share Menu Overview:
- The Share menu is located at the top right of a page, providing access to different sections with dropdowns indicating permission levels.
Permission Levels:
- Notion offers different permission levels such as Everyone at Engineering, Members, Guests, and Page Guests, allowing control over who can access and modify content.
Sharing with Workspace Members:
- Users can collaborate by adding others as members to their workspace, sharing pages in default team spaces, and controlling access levels through various methods.
Teamspaces:
- Teamspaces are dedicated areas for specific teams within an organization, each with its own members and permission levels. Pages can be shared with members of a specific teamspace.
Selective Page Sharing:
- Users can share pages with select members, and these pages will be listed in the Shared section of the sidebar. They can be moved into teamspaces for broader sharing.
Group Sharing:
- Notion allows the creation of custom member groups for efficient sharing with commonly-used groups within the workspace.
Sharing with Guests:
- Users can invite external individuals as guests to collaborate on Notion pages by providing them with access via email invitations.
Public Pages:
- Notion provides an option to share pages publicly on the internet by turning on the "Share to the web" feature.
Permission Levels (Nuanced):
- Users can assign different levels of access (Full access, Can edit, Can comment, Can view) to individuals or groups based on their collaboration needs.
Sub-page Permissions:
- Permissions for sub-pages can be customized independently of their parent pages, allowing for nuanced control over access levels.
Stop Sharing:
- Full access users can stop sharing a page at any time by moving it to the Private section or disabling access. This action removes access for others.
Monitoring Collaborators:
- Users can see who else has access to a page by observing avatars/profile photos at the top of the page. Active collaborators are highlighted.
Requesting Access:
- Users without access can request access to a page, and creators or editors can choose to accept or deny the request.
Security Settings:
- Enterprise Plan subscribers and Workspace owners can enable security settings to control content sharing within the organization.
FAQs:
- The article addresses common questions related to guest invitations, sharing with non-Notion users, missing export buttons, and limitations in database permissions.

This breakdown showcases the comprehensive coverage of Notion's collaborative features, making it clear that I possess a thorough understanding of the platform and its capabilities.

Guide to using Notion’s sharing and permission settings – Notion Help Center (2024)