Understand guest roles in Slack

Guest roles let you work with people that only have limited access to your company's Slack workspace – such as contractors, interns or clients. Guests are only available on Slack’s paid subscriptions.

Guests vs. Slack Connect

Inviting guests to your workspace means that your company is responsible for paying for their account. Guest accounts are useful if you’re working with an external contractor who doesn’t have their own workspace, or if you need to be able to add and remove them from specific channels in your workspace.

If the person that you want to add also uses Slack at their company, try using Slack Connect instead to collaborate together from your separate workspaces.

Learn more about the difference between Slack Connect and guest accounts, or read on for information about guest roles in Slack.

Billing for guests

Guest accounts are only available on paid subscriptions. There are two types of guest roles:

• Multi-channel guests have access to only the channels that you specify. They're billed as regular members and can be added to an unlimited number of channels.
• Single-channel guests are free and can only access one channel. For every paid active member in your workspace, you can add up to five guests. For example, if you have ten members, you can invite up to 50 single-channel guests.

Manage guest accounts

Invite a new guest

Workspace owners and admins can invite guests to a workspace, but members can submit requests to invite guests. Learn more about invitations. 

Convert a member to a guest

Workspace owners and admins can switch any member to a guest role. Learn how to change a member’s role.

Set automatic deactivations for guests

Workspace owners and admins can determine how long guests will have access to a workspace. You can do the following:

• Automatically deactivate a guest after a certain amount of time
• Set a custom deactivation date
• Allow a guest to have access indefinitely

Five days before deactivation, the guest and the owner or admin who set the date will get a reminder from Slackbot. The owner or admin can choose to extend the time limit if needed.

Note: Multi-channel guest accounts with a time limit are still billed like regular members. If they're only active during a portion of your workspace's billing cycle, we'll deposit prorated credits to your account.

Manage access to channels

Guests must be added to channels in your Slack workspace. Here’s how to manage which channels a guest can access:

1. From your desktop, click your workspace name in the sidebar.
   
2. Hover over Tools & settings, then select Manage members.
3. Click the  three dots icon to the right of the member that you wish to edit.
4. For a single-channel guest, click Edit channel and change their current channel. For multi-channel guests, click Edit channels. Click Add, then tick the box next to the channels that they'll have access to. To remove them from a channel, tick the box next to the channel, then click Remove.

Members can add multi-channel guests to additional private channels after they've joined the workspace. Only workspace owners and admins can manage multi-channel guests' public channel access and single-channel guests' channel access.

Tip: Multi-channel guests have a  square shape next to their names, while single-channel guests have a triangle.

View guest profiles in your workspace directory

When you add a guest to your workspace, a new profile will auto-populate in your directory with the following information:

• Which workspace owner or admin invited the guest
• Which channel(s) the guest has access to
• If a time limit is set, the date a guest account will be deactivated

View a guest's profile

1. From your desktop, hover over  More in the sidebar.
   
2. Hover over  Your organisation, then click  People. 
3. Enter a guest’s name, display name, job title or email address in the Search field, or select Guests from the Account type drop-down menu to browse all guests.
4. Click the guest’s profile picture to open the profile and view more options.

Note: Guest profile fields aren’t available on Slack’s mobile apps.

Permissions for guests

Understand what guests have permission to do in Slack. Or, visit Permissions by role in Slack for more.

✓ - Available
◼ - Available only if a workspace owner chooses

	Multi-channel guests	Single-channel guests
See members/apps in channels that they can access	✓	✓
Create private channels	✷
Create public channels
Accept a public channel invitation from an admin	✓
Accept a private channel invitation from any member	✓
Invite other members to a private channel	✓
Rename, archive or delete channels
Remove other members from channels
Set channel topics and purposes
Start and join huddles in channels	✓	✓
Leave public channels
Leave private channels	✓
Make @channel and @here announcements	✷	✷
Make @everyone announcements	✷	✷
Be added to or mention user groups
Direct message members in the same channels*	✓	✓
Start a group DM with members in the same channels*	✓
Start a one-to-one huddle with members in the same channels	✓	✓
See message and file history in channels that they can access	✓	✓
Create external links to files in public channels
Post in the #general channel (if they have access)	✓	✓
Install or remove apps
Authorise or connect a Slack account to use apps
Use shortcuts	✷
Find and use workflows†	✓	✓

*A guest can only start a DM with a member who’s in the same channel(s). But a member can start a DM with any guest, even if they’re not in the same channel. On Grid, members must share workspace membership with a guest to start a DM with them. Changing a guest's channel membership or role doesn't end existing DMs.
† Workflow managers can adjust the permissions on a workflow to only allow specific people to find and use it. A guest can only run workflows that they have permission to find and use. 

 

Who can use this feature?

• Workspace owners and workspace admins can manage guests
• Available on paid subscriptions