1.4Accounts, Plans, and Enterprise

To start using GitHub you create an account. The right account type and plan depend on whether you use it alone or as a team/company. This section surveys the structures that appear as you scale up.

1.4.1Types of accounts

• Personal account: an account for one individual, holding your own repositories and settings.
• Organization account: an account for managing members and repositories together. People join with their personal accounts, while the organization provides centralized billing, teams, and permissions.

In an organization you group members into Teams and manage repository access per team (permission details are covered in Chapter 4). This keeps administration consistent as the number of people grows.

1.4.2GitHub plans

GitHub offers plans for different needs and scales. The exact free allowances change, but the simplest way to think about it is: the larger the scale, the more management, security, and governance features you get.

1.4.3GitHub Enterprise

GitHub Enterprise targets large organizations: it groups multiple organizations for centralized management and provides governance features like SAML SSO (single sign-on), centralized billing, and policy management. It comes in two forms.

Enterprise Managed Users (EMU)

A model where a company creates dedicated user accounts managed centrally through its own identity provider (IdP) within the enterprise. These are separate from users personal accounts, so the company fully controls them.

1.4.4Section summary

• A personal account is for one person; an Organization centrally manages members, teams, and repos
• Plans add more management, security, and governance as scale grows (Free → Team → Enterprise)
• Enterprise groups multiple orgs, in two forms: Cloud (GitHub-hosted) / Server (self-hosted)
• EMU are dedicated users managed centrally via an IdP; an organization can require 2FA