Sharing & permissions

Notion is built to be super collaborative, so there's a number of ways to share the content you create with other people. Our permission levels ensure that they access this content exactly the way you want them to 🤝

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Need more controls and support? Contact sales about our Enterprise plan →

Ways to share Share menu Share with your team Share with individual teammates Share with groups Share outside your team Share on the web Stop sharing Permission levels How to edit permissions How to restrict, expand & restore sub-page permissions Disable access Security settings See who's sharing a page FAQs Related guides

Ways to share

There are several different ways you can share the pages and databases you build in Notion with folks inside and outside your workspace. Below is an overview of all the ways to share.

Share menu

First, here's a quick tour of the Share menu, which can be clicked at the top right of your page. On mobile, click the share icon next to the ••• at the top right for the same options.

Each row in this menu represents a different person or group of people you can share the page with. In the menu above for this Engineering Wiki page:

Share to web is turned off, so only you and your teammates can see this page.
Everyone at Acme Inc means everyone in the workspace can comment on the page.
ada@lovelace.com is an example guest on the page who was invited from outside the workspace — she can only view the page.
David Tibbitts is an example of a team member with Full Access to the page. They'll be able to make edits and invite additional people.

The dropdown menus on the right let you set their level of access.

Copy link copies the page's unique URL to your clipboard so you can share it with whoever you want. Still, only people with access to the page can see it.

Add people lets you add people both inside or outside your workspace to a page using their email address.

External folks will be added as guests.
You can assign both guests and other workspace members a level of access using the dropdown menus:

Share with your team

You can collaborate with other people in Notion by adding them as members to your workspace (Team Plan & Enterprise Plan only). These can be your teammates at work, friends, or anyone you want to work with on pages. There are a few ways to share Notion pages with other members so you can work together:

Any page in the Workspace section of your sidebar is shared with all workspace members.

You can drag a page from Shared or Private in your sidebar into Workspace to share it.

In the Share menu, you can turn on access for Everyone at [workspace] at a certain level selected from the dropdown:

Share with individual teammates

Sometimes you'll want to share a page with only select other members of your workspace — like a meeting doc you share with your manager, or notes for a small project team.

Click Share at the top right of a private page you want to share with these members.

Click the Add people button and add the members you want by typing in their email addresses. You can set their access levels from the dropdown in the invite window.

Pages that you share with only a few members but not your entire workspace will show up in the Shared section of your sidebar. Drag them into Workspace to share them team-wide.

If you have more than 7 pages in the Shared section, you can pick which ones you'd like to keep pinned to the sidebar.

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Tip: In the Shared section pop-up, you can also search for shared pages, sort by Relevance or Last edited, and easily copy page links!

Share with groups

To make it easier to share with commonly-used groups (i.e. your company's engineering team or community team), you can create your own member groups and assign them permission to access pages as units. Full guide on groups and group permissions here →

Here are quick instructions for group sharing:

Go to Settings & Members and you'll see a list of all your members and guests. Click the Groups heading at the top of that list.

Click Create a group, give it a name, and add the members you want.

To share a page with a particular group, go to Share at the top right of that page, then click the Add people button. You'll see your groups listed in the invite pop-up that appears:

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Tip: Everyone at [workspace name] sets the minimum access level on a page for everyone on your team. To give certain people or groups higher access levels, set the access level for Everyone at [workspace name] to Can view or Can comment.

Share outside your team

You can invite people from outside your workspace to join pages as guests. Let's say you want to share a Notion page with an external contractor you've hired. Or perhaps you're the contractor and you want to share a page with a client. This is an ideal solution.

Full guide on guests here →

Quick instructions for sharing with guests:

Click Share at the top right of the Notion page you want to share externally.

Click the Add people button and add the people you want using their email addresses. Set their access levels using the dropdown menu.

Whoever you invite this way will receive an email with a link to the page you've invited them to view or edit.

If you want to see all the guests in your workspace and the pages they have permission to access, go to the Members section of Settings & Members and go to the Guests tab.

In this same window, you can remove guests from your workspace, change their access levels, or convert them to full members. More on this here →

Share on the web

To make a Notion page viewable as a site on the web or to share it with people who don't use Notion, you can turn on Share to the web. Anyone with the link will be able to see it.

Full guide to public pages here →

Quick instructions for making pages public:

Click on Share at the top right of the page you want to publish to the web.

By default, the access level next to Share to the web will be No access.

To publish your page to the web, change the access level to one of these:

Can view means your page is published to the web, but can't be edited or commented on by other Notion users.
Can comment means that anyone with a Notion account can leave comments on your page after you share the link with them.
Can edit means anyone with a Notion account can make edits on your page after you share the link with them.

You'll see a couple other options too once you turn on Share to the web access:

Allow duplicate as template: Switch this off so that other Notion users can't duplicate your page to their own workspace to edit. This is on by default.
Search engine indexing (paid plans only): Switch this on so that your page can appear in search results on Google and other search engines. This is off by default.

Click Copy link to copy the page's unique URL to share.

Only people with the page's unique URL will be able to see it.

Stop sharing

If you have full access to a page, you can disable sharing with anyone at any time.

The fastest way is to move the page from Workspace or Shared in your sidebar to the Private section. Make sure this is what you really want to do, though, because everyone else will lose access.

Click on Share at the top right of the page, and switch off access for your workspace, individuals, groups, or the public. You can also select Disable from the dropdown next to any of these.

For guests, click Share and then select Remove from the dropdown next to their names. You can also go to Settings & Members, scroll down to find the guests you want, click on the dropdown to the right of their names and click the Remove button.

Permission levels

This is where Notion's sharing options get nuanced and granular. For every person or group you share with, you can assign a different level of access. For example, this is helpful if:

You want only a few people to edit a page, while everyone else reads it.

You want some pages to only be visible to a specific team.

You only want to collect comments on a piece of writing.

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Note: One more reminder that when you share a page, all the sub-pages it contains will be shared with the same people in the same way. But you can still assign higher or lower levels of access for sub-pages later.

How to edit permissions

Whenever you invite someone to a page, or click on Share, you'll see right-hand dropdown menus next to people or groups that let you select their level of access: Full Access, Can Edit, Can Comment, and Can View.

Full access: People with full access to a page can edit any of the content it contains and share the page with anyone they want using all the mechanisms in this guide.

Can edit: Select this level of access for people or groups who should be able to edit the content on the page, but not share the page.

Can comment: Select this level of access for people and groups who should only have the ability to comment on a page's content, not actually edit it. They also can't share the page with others.

Can view: People with Can View access can simply read the content on the page, but not comment on it or edit it. They also can't share the page with others.

How to restrict, expand & restore sub-page permissions

By default, any page that's nested inside a page (a child page) will inherit the same permissions as the page it's nested in (the parent page). But you can assign higher or lower levels of permission for sub-pages to meet your needs.

For example: In the screenshot below, everyone at Acme Inc. has Can comment access to the Engineering Wiki and all its sub-pages. David Tibbitts is the only team member who's able to make edits, or share with more people.

In a sub-page such as the "Engineering Guidelines" page, you may want to expand permissions to allow a member, guest, permission group, or the entire workspace to be higher than Can comment. In the permission level dropdown for this example, you would select Can edit or Full access.

Note that the permission level of "Engineering Guidelines" is determined by the "Engineering Wiki" parent page, but it can be overridden.

In a sub-page, you can restrict permissions to prevent members, guests, permission groups, or the entire workspace from commenting, or from seeing the page at all. In the permission level dropdown for this example, you would select Can comment or No access.

Note that once access is removed for Everyone at Acme Inc, now the "Backend" sub-page can only be seen and edited by the Backend engineers permission group, and one other teammate with Full access. Think of it as a "secret page" 🔮

When you restrict the permission levels of a sub-page, a Restore button will appear at the top of your Share menu. Use it to revert the permissions back to default, and inherit from the parent page.

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Tip: You can create "secret pages" that only certain people or groups can see, by setting the permission level of a sub-page to No access for the people or groups you want to hide the page from.

Disable access

To revoke a person or group's access to a page (and it's sub-pages), choose Remove from the list of access options in the dropdown menu to their right in the Share menu. They won't be able to view the page anymore, and it will disappear from their sidebar.

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Note: People who do not have any access to a page will not see it in their workspace. It might appear in your sidebar, but not in theirs.

Security settings

If you have an Enterprise Plan subscription, and you're an admin in the workspace, you can prevent content from being shared by turning on certain security settings. Contact sales to learn more about our Enterprise plan →

Go to Settings & Members at the top of your left sidebar.

Click Settings in the sidebar of the window that pops up.

Scroll down to the Security & SAML section, where you'll these toggle switches:

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Note: These options can only be edited if you have an Enterprise Plan subscription, are an admin in the workspace, and on desktop.

See who's sharing a page

You can tell who else has access to a page because their avatars/profile photos can be seen in the bar at the very top of the page.

An avatar appears faded out if that person is not currently looking at the page.

An avatar appears unfaded if the person is currently on the page.

Hovering over an avatar will show you the person's name, email, and when they were last on the page.

Clicking on an active avatar will jump you to the part of the page where they're reading or typing.

When people are collaborating on the same page at the same time, you'll see their avatars move next to the blocks they are looking at or editing.

Click ••• at the top right of any page and look at the bottom of the menu that pops up. You'll see who last edited the page and when.

FAQs

I want to share a page with a client, but they don't use Notion.

You can enable Share to the web in the Share menu, and share the URL with them. As long as you keep the Search engine indexing setting disabled (always disabled by default), only people with that exact URL will be able to access the page. They'll be able to view the page, even if they don't have a Notion account. However, they won't be able to make any edits, leave comments, or sort/filter a database.

My Export button is missing, it doesn't appear in any menus.

You may have the Disable Export setting enabled in the Settings tab of Settings & Members in your left sidebar. You'll need to be an admin in your workspace, and on desktop to change this.

Can I limit access to different parts of a database? Can you make it so that some people can see certain database views or properties, but not others?

Unfortunately, database permissions don't get quite that granular yet 😓 It’s a legit use case though, and definitely something we want to support in the future. Stay tuned!

Related guides

Something we didn't cover? Message us in the app by clicking ? at the bottom right on desktop (or in your sidebar on mobile). Or email us at team@makenotion.com ✌️