Roles and permissions

There are several roles in a Zulip organization.

Organization Administrator: Can manage users, public streams, organization settings, and billing.
Member: Has access to all public streams. This is the default role for most users.
Guest: Can only access streams they've been added to. Cannot create new streams.

For details of the access control model, see Stream permissions. You can decide what role to invite a user as when you send them an invitation.

Billing and guests

Guests are only available on Zulip on-premise and on paid plans for Zulip Cloud. There are two kinds of guest for billing purposes:

Multi-stream guest: Has been added to multiple streams. These guests are billed the same as regular members.
Single-stream guest: Has been added to only a single stream. If you have M paying users, you get 5M free single-stream guests. Similarly, if you have G single-stream guests, you'll get charged for G/5 users.

Example: You have 8 members, 2 multi-stream guests, and 50 single-stream guests. You'll get charged for 10 users. Let's say you have 8 members, 2 multi-stream guests, and 51 single-stream guests. You'll get charged for 11 users.

Single-stream guests are a new feature, and their permissions are likely to change over time. For example, single-stream guests can currently see the list of members in the organization, but we may remove that ability in the future.