Permission groups are the worry-free way to give or restrict access to Notion pages

Make sure the right teams or groups of people see what they’re supposed to.

6 min read
Permission group- screenshot
Each team at your company can have a permission group, which makes sharing pages easy.
In this guide
  • In this piece, you’ll learn
  • How permissions work in Notion
  • How to create and use permission groups in Notion
  • Set up a group for every department
  • Ways to use permission groups
  • Permission groups promote collaboration and organization

Your company likely has layers of information — and your employees need different types of access to that information based on their role, team, assignments, etc.

For example, engineers might need the ability to edit a feature spec, while marketing only needs to view and comment on that page. And there’s probably only a small group of people you want editing, say, your benefits information. But you want everyone else to be able to read it.

Information structure can get complicated as your company increases in size, but Notion's permissions grow to meet those evolving needs.

The Share menu gives you the full breakdown of who can do what on a page. Quickly and easily assign permissions to individuals (inside or outside your company) or to entire teams — so you can stop wasting time untangling who needs to see what and collaborate more efficiently.

In this piece, you’ll learn

  1. 1

    The different permission settings in Notion.

  2. 2

    How to create permission groups in your workspace.

  3. 3

    How to change permission settings, and why group permissions are beneficial.

How permissions work in Notion

Permissions in Notion grant the level of access anyone has to a particular page in the workspace. Within any page, you can decide who can view, make changes, leave comments, or share the page with others.

You can choose from the following options in Notion:

  • Full access — you can edit the page and share it with others.

  • Can edit — you can edit the page, but not share it.

  • Can comment — you can’t edit the page, but can view it and leave comments.

  • Can view — you can view the page but not leave comments, share or edit.

  • No access — the page is hidden from you and it will not appear in search.

Here’s a 9-minute video that details sharing and permissions:

Typically, sub-pages inherit the same permission settings as their parent page. But you can edit that.

Permission groups give you the ability to batch these levels of access for collections of people. For example, you can create groups for the different departments within your company, making it simple to grant a specific level of access to a number of people.

How to create and use permission groups in Notion

It can be easy to forget someone when you're sharing a document with your team — and then, that person has to request access via email, which you might not see for a while, slowing their workflow.

But once you make permission groups in Notion, you can share pages and grant the correct level of access in a flash.

Set up a group for every department

We recommend creating separate groups for each team at your company, such as HR, marketing, or engineering. You can also have other groups based on shared projects. You’ll need to be a workspace admin to create groups.

This means you can quickly assign different group permissions throughout the workspace, and you can use individual permissions any time you need to add one or two extra people to a certain page.

These groups help you save time because they only need to be set up once, and you'll never have to worry about double-checking that you haven’t missed anyone from the team when sharing a page with them.

To create a group:

  • Go to Settings & Members in your sidebar.

  • You’ll see two tabs — Members and Groups. Go to the Groups tab.

  • Select Create a Group and click Add members.

  • Choose someone from the drop-down or start typing their name to search.

  • Then, click Add to add them to the group.

Once you’ve added all the team members, you can give your group a name and choose an emoji to make it more memorable.

If you need to remove someone from a group, simply click Remove next to their name.

Ways to use permission groups

Of course, the pages in your workspace require diverse sets of permissions. Let’s throw a hypothetical out there.

You want to make sure that your company wiki is visible to everyone, but can only be edited by members of the HR team.

  • In the HR wiki page, click Share on the top right. You can add team members individually by clicking in the box, typing their name or email address, and using the drop-down next to their name to assign their permission level.

  • This approach works fine, but it takes time to add every person one by one, and select the appropriate permission level for each. Now imagine doing this for a large team with hundreds of employees.

  • For a speedier solution, it’s better to first create a group for HR. Groups will appear in the sharing options, and you can use the drop-down next to the group name to assign a level of access. In this case, we’ll make sure the HR group has full access. You must also remember to change the sharing permissions for everyone else in the workspace, because if everyone already has full access to the page, giving HR permissions won’t change much.

  • Assign other groups’ access levels one by one, or change the access level for everyone else in the workspace. Click on the group Everyone at [your company] and edit this to view only.

Now, everyone in the company can view the HR wiki, while only HR team members can edit it.

Permission groups promote collaboration and organization

Permission groups make collaboration easier and help connect teams across the organization. They provide transparency because everyone can see what they need to focus on, and who they’re working with.

Take product managers, who often work with designers and engineers. If they need to collaborate with designers, they can invite the design team to edit a page with the click of a button.

Or, if they need feedback on a product spec from engineers, they can give the engineering team access to view and comment. The doc can be hidden from everyone else until the project is ready to ship.

Plus, the workspace will stay tidy as static documents, like your company’s mission statement, can be edited by few but viewed by everyone with no risk of anything being changed.

Resources for creating permission groups

Share this guide

Start with a template

Browse over 10,000 templates in our template gallery


Something we didn't cover?