Roles and permissions

Overview of Swarmia access control.

Managing access

• GitHub. If you're using GitHub to manage access, all members of your GitHub organization can access Swarmia with their GitHub login.

• Okta, Google, and Microsoft Entra SSO. With Okta, Google, and Microsoft Entra single-sign-on, you can control which users or groups have access to Swarmia.

Roles and permissions

Swarmia supports role-based access control with the following roles and permissions:

• Organization admin has full access to Swarmia and can configure all settings. The first user in your organization (who connected Swarmia to GitHub) has organization admin rights and can assign additional organization admins.

• Editor can access everything, except the most sensitive organization settings, software capitalization, and creating developer experience surveys. The editor role is a popular choice among startups that don't require granular permissions and want all users to be able to edit most of the settings.

• Viewer cannot edit organization or team settings, and they don't have access to software capitalization or the ability to create developer experience surveys or initiatives. For Swarmia organizations created after October 17th, 2025, the viewer role is the default for new users, and it can be changed to editor or organization admin.

• Team admin can access team configuration and settings for a specific team and its sub-teams, and they can assign more admins to their team(s). A user can have the team admin role for one or more teams. Using the team admin role is recommended for organizations that want more control over who can access Swarmia settings, while delegating team configuration to specific people.

Each Swarmia user has one organization-wide role (organization admin, editor, or viewer), and in addition, they can have a team admin role for one or more teams.

The table lists all Swarmia permissions that vary by role. If an object is not listed in the table, all roles have full access to it.

Object	Org admin	Editor	Viewer	Team admin
User roles	Edit	View	View
Subscription	Edit	View	View
Integrations	Edit	View	View
Org pull request filters	Edit	View	View
Investment breakdowns	Edit	View	View
Prod. environment filters and hot fit detection	Edit	View	View
Deployment applications	Edit	Edit	View
Contributor merge	Edit	Edit	View
Initiatives	Edit	Edit	View
Survey creation	Edit
Software capitalization	Edit
WBSO timesheet approval	Edit			Edit
Team management	Edit	Edit	View	Edit
Team pull request filters	Edit	Edit	View	Edit
Team issue mappings	Edit	Edit	View	Edit
Team notifications	Edit	Edit	View	Edit
Working agreements	Edit	Edit	View	Edit

Assigning roles

Organization-wide roles

Organization-wide roles (organization admin, editor, and viewer) are managed in Role settings. You can view the role of each user, and change those individually or in bulk by selecting one or more users. With filters, you can find people based on their role, team, and whether they are Swarmia users. Assigning roles to contributors who are not yet Swarmia users gives them broader access (e.g., organization admin) when they sign up to Swarmia.

You can change the default role for new users in your organization by clicking the Set default role button and selecting a role.

Select one or more contributors to assign roles.

Team admins

Team admins are assigned in team settings by creating or editing a team. Team admin is an optional setting, and you can assign one or more admins per team. The team settings page lists admins for each team and allows you to identify teams without one.

Assign team admins by editing a team.

What do I do when my organization has no admins?

Your Swarmia account can have no organization admin if all users who had admin rights in Swarmia are removed from your GitHub organization. In this case, email us at [email protected], and we will help you move forward.