Roles and permissions

Access in AACFlow.io is organized into three nested levels — your organization, the workspaces inside it, and the credentials (connected accounts and secrets) inside those. Each level has its own roles, and roles inherit downward: an admin at one level is automatically an admin at the level below. Inheritance only ever adds access — it never takes access away from someone who already has it.

How roles inherit

Each level has its own set of roles:

Higher roles flow down automatically:

• An organization Owner or Admin is automatically an Admin of every workspace in the organization — no per-workspace invite required.
• A workspace Admin is automatically an Admin of every shared credential in that workspace — OAuth connections, service accounts, and workspace secrets.

Put together, an organization Owner or Admin can administer every workspace and every shared credential in the organization, top to bottom.

Inherited roles are automatic and locked. In member lists they show greyed out with a short tooltip saying where the role comes from (for example, "Organization admins are automatically workspace admins"), and they can't be lowered there — you change them at the level they come from.

Workspaces and Organizations

AACFlow.io has two kinds of workspaces:

• Personal workspaces live under your individual account. The number you can create depends on your plan.
• Shared (organization) workspaces live under an organization and are available on Team and Enterprise plans. Any organization Owner or Admin can create them. Internal members invited to a shared workspace join the organization and count toward your seat total. Existing AACFlow.io users who already belong to another organization can be added as external workspace members instead, giving them access to the workspace without adding them to your organization roster or using one of your seats.

Workspace Limits by Plan

On Team and Enterprise plans, every workspace you create belongs to the organization. Organization Owners and Admins can create unlimited shared workspaces; organization Members cannot create workspaces. Personal workspaces created before joining the organization remain accessible. Enterprise invites require an available seat at invite time; on Team plans, a seat is added automatically when the invitee accepts.

How to Invite Someone to a Workspace

Workspace Permission Levels

When inviting someone to a workspace, you can assign one of three permission levels:

Internal Members vs External Workspace Members

Workspace permissions are separate from organization membership:

• Internal organization members belong to your organization, appear in the organization roster, and count toward your seat total. Invite new teammates this way when they should be part of your company or team in AACFlow.io.
• External workspace members have access only to the workspace they are invited to. They keep their own organization membership, do not appear in your organization roster, and do not count toward your organization's seats. Use external access for clients, partners, contractors, or collaborators who already use AACFlow.io in another organization.

External workspace members still receive a workspace permission level — Read, Write, or Admin — and that permission controls what they can do inside the workspace.

What Each Permission Level Can Do

Here's a detailed breakdown of what users can do with each permission level:

Read Permission

What they can do:

• View all workflows in the workspace
• See workflow execution results and logs
• Browse workflow configurations and settings
• View environment variables (but not edit them)

What they cannot do:

• Create, edit, or delete workflows
• Run or deploy workflows
• Change any workspace settings
• Invite other users

Write Permission

What they can do:

• Everything Read users can do, plus:
• Create, edit, and delete workflows
• Run and deploy workflows
• Add, edit, and delete workspace environment variables
• Use all available tools and integrations
• Collaborate in real-time on workflow editing

What they cannot do:

• Invite or remove users from the workspace
• Change workspace settings
• Delete the workspace

Admin Permission

What they can do:

• Everything Write users can do, plus:
• Invite new users to the workspace with any permission level
• Remove users from the workspace
• Manage workspace settings and integrations
• Administer every shared credential in the workspace (OAuth connections, service accounts, and workspace secrets)
• Delete workflows created by other users
• Delete the workspace

What they cannot do:

• Change a role that's inherited from a higher level — an organization admin's workspace role, or the owner's, is locked and managed where it comes from

Workspace Owner

Every workspace has one Owner — usually the person who created it. The Owner is simply an Admin whose role is fixed: in the member list it shows as a locked Admin (tooltip "Workspace owner"), so it can't be lowered. An Owner has no abilities a regular Admin lacks.

Any Admin — whether invited directly or an admin by way of their organization role — can manage members and settings and delete the workspace. On a shared workspace an Admin can also remove the Owner; ownership then passes to the organization's owner, so the workspace always has one. (The organization's owner is the one account that can't be removed this way — they're the final fallback.) On your personal workspace you are the Owner and can't be removed.

Common Scenarios

Adding a New Developer to Your Team

1. Organization level: Invite them as an Organization Member
2. Workspace level: Give them Write permission so they can create and edit workflows

Adding a Project Manager

1. Organization level: Invite them as an Organization Member
2. Workspace level: Give them Admin permission so they can manage the team and see everything

Adding a Stakeholder or Client

1. Organization level: If they should not join your organization, add them as an External workspace member
2. Workspace level: Give them Read permission so they can see progress but not make changes

Environment Variables

Users can create two types of environment variables:

Personal Environment Variables

• Only visible to the individual user, and never shared or inherited — not even by workspace or organization admins
• Available in all workflows they run
• Managed in Settings, then go to Secrets

Workspace Environment Variables

• Read: see variable names (the values stay hidden unless you're an admin of that secret)
• Write: add new variables, and edit or delete ones you created
• Admin: add, edit, delete, and view the values of any workspace variable
• Workspace variables are a kind of workspace credential, so they follow the Credential Access rules below — workspace Admins are admins of all of them
• Available to all workspace members. If a workspace variable and a personal variable share the same name, the workspace value wins when a workflow runs

Credential Access

Workspace credentials — OAuth connections, service accounts, and workspace environment variables — have two roles of their own:

• Credential Member: can use the credential in workflows.
• Credential Admin: can use it and also edit, delete, and share it.

These roles follow your workspace role:

• Workspace Admins are automatically Credential Admins of every shared credential in the workspace (OAuth connections, service accounts, and workspace environment variables). Because organization Owners and Admins are workspace Admins everywhere, they are Credential Admins too. These automatic roles are fixed — they show greyed out with a tooltip in the credential's member list and cannot be changed.
• Read and Write members are Credential Members by default — they can use shared credentials but cannot edit, delete, or share them unless someone makes them a Credential Admin (you are always an admin of credentials you create).
• Personal environment variables are the exception: they stay private to their owner and are never shared with workspace admins.

Organization Roles

An organization has three roles: Owner, Admin, and Member.

Organization Owner

What they can do:

• Everything an Admin can do
• Transfer organization ownership to another user
• Only one Owner exists per organization

Organization Admin

What they can do:

• Invite and remove team members from the organization
• Create new shared workspaces under the organization
• Manage billing, seat count, and subscription settings
• Access every shared workspace in the organization as a workspace Admin automatically (no per-workspace invite), including administering the credentials inside them
• Promote members to Admin or demote Admins to Member

Organization Member

What they can do:

• Access shared workspaces they've been specifically invited to
• View the list of organization members
• Cannot invite new people, create shared workspaces, or manage organization settings