Private teams

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

Overview

This feature is available on Linear's Business and Enterprise plans. Anyone in the workspace can create a private team or make an existing team private.

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.

Visibility

Private team: Workspace admins can see all private teams in settings, update team settings, or join a private team by adding themselves as a member. If an admin attempts to join a team, they will receive a pop-up warning before confirming.

Issues: Those who are not a member of the private team will not be able to see issues associated with the team. You cannot @ mention a member in an issue in the private team who is not already a member of the private team.

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. If the project is shared with a public team, the name will become visible, though the name of the private team or issues within it do not become visible to non-members.

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

Configure

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

To make an existing team private or vice versa, go to Team settings -> General -> Change team visibility and click Make team private. Any assignees that are not members of the private team will be removed and any subscribers to issues in the newly private team will be unsubscribed.

Private team members

The person who creates a private team or converts an existing team to private becomes the default owner of the private team with full access to its issues and team settings.

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.

Exports

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

Integrations

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