Private teams

Create private teams for issues that should only be accessed by certain workspace members.

Overview

Private teams are visible to select members in the workspace. The team and issues in them are accessible to those invited (and admins have limited access). Anyone in the workspace can create a private team or make an existing team private.

Outside of permissions-related functionality, private teams work just like other teams. This feature is available on Linear's paid plans.

Configure

When creating teams from workspace settings, toggle the option to make the team private.

To make an existing team private or vice versa, go to Team Settings > General and update privacy settings. Making a team private will remove any assignees that are not members of the private team (managed under team members settings). Likewise, any subscribers to issues in the newly private team will be removed.

Basics

Use cases

Private teams may be helpful in cases where:

• Work is sensitive and should be limited to only some team members (e.g. HR, customer data, founders or exec team).
• You want a personal team to keep track of issues.

Add/remove members

Owners of a private team and workspace admins can go to Team settings > Members to invite other workspace members to the team or promote an existing team member to team owner. Members of a private team can leave the team on their own, but they won't be able to re-join the team without an explicit invite.

Access control

Private team issues and projects are not visible to members outside of the private team.

The person who creates a private team or makes an existing team private becomes the default owner of the private team with full access to issues and team settings. Workspace admins have limited access; they can see all private teams in settings, update team settings, and join private teams but will not see issues in a private team unless they join it.

If an admin uses their privileges to join a private team, they'll be shown a warning and we'll notify the team owners.

Issues

Issues in a private team can only be viewed or assigned to members of that private team. You cannot @mention someone outside the team in private team issues. Only team members can be subscribed to issues of the private team.

Roadmap

Members of a private team can see its projects on the roadmap but those projects won't be visible to others.

Projects

Projects created under public teams: Projects created under public teams can be shared with private teams. Only private team members will be able to see that the project has been shared with the private team and view or add issues to the project that are associated with the private team.

Projects created under private teams: Projects created under private teams are visible to the private team members only, even if the project has been shared with another public team. Private team members can create issues in the project that are associated with public teams, but those issues will appear without an associated project to anyone outside of the private team.

API and webhooks

If your workspace has set up custom integrations or apps, please consider this when adding private team data to issues or privacy concerns whenever creating apps and integrations for Linear.

The API, webhooks, and integrations such as Zapier can expose a user's private team and issue titles. It's possible to access private issue data with the API if you are using a personal API key of a user that has access to private teams. Webhooks can also expose data from private teams as webhooks for private teams can be set up by team owners and workspace admins.

Exports

When exporting issues from the workspace using our Export tool, admins can choose to include issues from any private team.

Integrations

To ensure issue data remains private, private teams creates some limitations with existing integrations.