Bring a client into their own workspace
Invite a client as a Collaborator so they can see the work happening on their account without any ability to manage billing, other members, or workspace settings.
Workspace Collaborators
Invite teammates into your workspace by email and assign them a role: Owner, Admin, or Collaborator. Each role controls what a person can see and change, from full billing and workspace control down to using shared resources only. Pending invites can be resent or cancelled, and how many collaborators you can invite depends on your plan's seat limit.
Every workspace in Sistava is a separate, isolated place to run an AI workforce, and Workspace Collaborators is how you bring people into that specific workspace. From Settings > Organizations > Members, the owner or an admin enters a teammate's email, picks a role, and sends the invite. The invited person shows up as pending until they accept, and any pending invite can be resent or cancelled at any time.
Roles are not a formality: they gate real actions. Owners have full control, including billing, workspace settings, and destructive actions like deletion, and a workspace always keeps at least one Owner. Admins can invite and manage Collaborators, remove or demote non-Owners, and manage supported resource access, but cannot touch billing or workspace settings. Collaborators can use the workspace's employees, teams, and shared resources within their access grants, but cannot manage the roster, invitations, or billing.
The distinct part is that access does not stop at the role label. An Owner can open Customize Access for any non-owner collaborator and grant or revoke specific abilities, like inviting others or managing resource sharing, without changing their role name. That means you can hand someone Collaborator-level billing safety while still trusting them to manage invites, instead of forcing a binary choice between Admin and Collaborator.
Seats are enforced against the workspace's plan. Once the workspace hits its collaborator limit, new invitations stop until a seat opens up or the plan is upgraded, so you always know how much room you have before you start inviting people.
There is a firm line between everyday work and workspace administration, and Collaborators sit on the everyday side of it. Hiring, terminating, or reconfiguring an AI employee is administration, and so is connecting or revoking an external tool, an API key, or a webhook, because those touch credentials and data flows for the whole workspace. Those actions are limited to Owners and Admins. A Collaborator can work with the employees you already have, all day, without ever being able to fire one or unplug your Google account.
Inviting someone is not the same as giving them your workspace. Personal chats, personal notes, and files nobody has shared stay private to whoever created them, so a new Collaborator sees the work the workspace made collaborative and whatever has been shared with them directly, not everything that exists. An invitation also counts for nothing until it is accepted: a pending invite grants no access at all, and cancelling one before it is accepted leaves no trace of access behind.
Roles and What They Control
Owner has full control over collaborators, billing, workspace settings, and destructive actions such as deleting the workspace; every workspace must always keep at least one Owner.
Admin can invite Collaborators, remove or demote anyone who is not an Owner, and manage supported resource access, but cannot grant Owner or Admin status, touch billing, edit workspace settings, or delete the workspace.
Collaborator can use ordinary workspace routes and open workspace-visible or directly shared resources, but cannot manage the roster, invitations, another person's access, billing, or deletion.
Seats and Plan Limits
Every plan sets a maximum number of collaborators a workspace can hold, separate from the owner's own seat. The Members page shows current seat usage so you know exactly how much room is left before inviting anyone new.
When a workspace is full, sending another invite is blocked until a seat opens, either by removing an existing member or upgrading to a plan with a higher collaborator limit.
Everyday Work Versus Administration
Everyday work is deliberately not a privilege. A Collaborator can open the tasks, files, records, and employee work the workspace has made collaborative, comment on it, and get on with the job without asking an Owner for permission every time. That is the point of having colleagues in the workspace at all.
Administration is held back. Hiring, terminating, or reconfiguring AI employees sits with Owners and Admins, and so does connecting or revoking an external tool, API key, or webhook. Those actions change what the whole workspace can reach and who holds the credentials, which is a different kind of decision from finishing a task.
Money and survival stay narrower still. Changing the plan, the payment method, or buying credits is Owner territory by default, as is deleting the workspace or transferring ownership. Billing is the one of those an Owner can deliberately hand to someone else, which is how a workspace stays payable when the Owner is on holiday; workspace deletion and ownership never move.
How It Works
Email invite, role assignment, and plan-gated seats
An owner or admin opens Settings > Organizations > Members, enters an email address, and chooses a role: Owner, Admin, or Collaborator. Sending the invite creates a pending entry that shows on the Members page until the recipient accepts it, and it can be resent or cancelled at any point before that.
The number of teammates you can invite is set by your plan's seat limit, tracked separately from the owner's own seat. Once every seat is filled, the invite action stops working until a seat is freed by removing someone or the plan is upgraded to raise the limit.
Once someone accepts, their role decides what they can do inside that one workspace only: manage collaborators and resources, use shared resources without managing anyone else, or hold full Owner control. An Owner can further customize a specific person's access, like invitation rights or resource sharing, without changing their role label.
Use Cases
Add a co-founder as a second Owner
Invite a business partner as Owner so they share full control over billing, collaborators, and destructive actions, and the workspace never depends on a single person.
Delegate day-to-day member management
Invite an operations lead as Admin so they can onboard and offboard teammates and manage resource access, while billing and workspace settings stay with the Owner.
Grant a narrow exception without a role change
Use Customize Access to let one trusted Collaborator manage resource sharing or send invites, without promoting them to Admin and handing over everything that role includes.
Comparison
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Working with someone means sharing one login and hoping nobody wanders into billing. | Everyone gets their own invite and their own role, with billing and workspace settings held back. |
| Access is all or nothing: hand over full control, or answer permission requests all day. | Customize Access grants one specific ability to one person without changing their role. |
| You find out you are out of room when an invitation quietly fails to go anywhere. | The Members page shows seat usage before you invite anyone, and a full workspace says so plainly. |
| A client who wants visibility ends up holding the keys to your whole account. | Invite them as a Collaborator: they see the work, not your roster, your billing, or your settings. |
FAQ
How do I invite someone to my workspace?
Open Settings > Organizations > Members, enter their email address, choose a role, and send the invite. It shows as pending until they accept, and you can resend or cancel it from the same page.
What is the difference between Admin and Collaborator?
Admins can invite and manage non-Owner collaborators and resource access, but cannot touch billing or workspace settings. Collaborators can only use workspace resources within their granted access and cannot manage the roster, invitations, or billing at all.
How many people can I invite?
Your plan sets a seat limit for the workspace, separate from the owner's own seat. Once that limit is reached, new invitations are blocked until a seat is freed or the plan is upgraded.
Can I give someone extra access without making them an Admin?
Yes. An Owner can open Customize Access for a non-owner collaborator and grant or revoke specific abilities, like invitation rights or resource sharing, without changing their assigned role.
Can a collaborator fire my AI employees or disconnect my accounts?
No. Hiring, terminating, and reconfiguring an AI employee counts as workspace administration and is limited to Owners and Admins, and so is connecting or revoking an external tool, API key, or webhook. A Collaborator works with the employees and connections you already have without being able to remove either.
Will the person I invite be able to read my private chats?
No. Personal chats, personal notes, and files nobody has shared stay private to whoever created them. Someone you invite sees the work the workspace has made collaborative plus anything shared with them directly, not everything in the account.
Can I let someone handle billing without making them an owner?
Yes. Billing sits with Owners by default, but an Owner can grant it explicitly to one person through Customize Access without changing their role. That is how a workspace stays payable when the Owner is away, and it stays deliberate: no Admin picks it up automatically.
What happens if I remove the only owner of a workspace?
You cannot. A workspace must always keep at least one Owner, so the action is blocked rather than leaving an account nobody controls. Promote someone else to Owner first if you want to step back.
Where Workspace Collaborators fits
Workspace Collaborators is part of Where their work lives.
Your AI agents manage their own workspace. Scheduled tasks run daily, weekly, or on custom cron cadences. A built-in kanban board tracks what is in progress. Every document lands in a personal Drive. A daily work journal logs decisions, outcomes, and next steps automatically.
- Where their work lives: Where your employees organize their work.
Read the guide
More in Workspace
- Move a Team Member to the Bench: Every workspace has one Bench: a holding area for employees who are not currently on a working team. Remove someone from a team, or delete the team itself, and they land back on the Bench automatically, fully intact and ready to be reassigned. Nothing about them is deleted; only their team membership changes.
- Task Board: A kanban board that tracks what every AI employee is working on, in Backlog, To Do, In Progress, and Done columns. Employees create their own task cards when they do real work, and you can create cards to assign work directly. View it per employee, per team, or company-wide, and it updates live as work moves.
- Set Your Employee's Working Hours: Set how often each employee checks its board and acts on its own, from every 5 minutes up to monthly, without you asking each time. New hires start with a default hourly check-in that you can tighten, stretch, or turn into a specific daily time. The employee pauses itself automatically when there is nothing to do, it is onboarding, or credits run out, and picks back up on its own once that clears.
- Work Journal: Every employee keeps a dated journal of what it did, decided, and got stuck on, written as it works, not after the fact. Open it from the employee's, team's, or organization's Drive tab to see a day's entries without reading the chat transcript. Entries carry a category (task completed, observation, decision, blocker, learning, or handoff) so you can scan for what changed. It starts on hire with nothing to configure.
- Task Comments: Comment directly on a task, Drive file, sprint, CRM contact, or notification, and @mention the person, team, or AI employee who should act on it. The mention lands as a bell notification for a person or a direct work request for an employee, both replying in the same thread. Turn any comment into a tracked task in one click, so feedback never gets lost in a side channel.
- CRM: Every business runs on a CRM, the shared book of the people and companies it deals with. Sistava builds one in, and your AI employees run it for you. They add a prospect the moment one comes up, keep contacts current, open deals and move them down the pipeline as they progress, and write notes so nothing is forgotten. You get one clean place to see who you know, what's in flight, and what it's worth, without paying for a separate CRM.
- Sales Pipeline: Your deals live on a pipeline board, the same shape as your task board: a column for every stage, New, Screening, Meeting, Proposal, Customer, and a card for each deal showing its value and the company behind it. As a deal gets closer to won, it moves down the board. Your AI employees keep the pipeline current, opening deals, moving stages, and updating amounts, so you always know what's in flight and what it's worth, at a glance.
- Let Your Employee Use Any Desktop App: Your employee controls your actual desktop, not just a browser tab. It clicks, types, manages files, and runs terminal commands in real applications on your machine, the same way you would sitting at the keyboard. It works through the free Desktop Companion app and covers native software, file management, and shell tasks in one capability.
- Let Your Employee Work with Local Files: Connect the Desktop Companion app and your employee can read, write, list, and search files on your own computer, scoped to your home directory. Ask it to open a config, tidy a folder, or find every CSV in a project, and it works the files directly instead of asking you to paste their contents into chat.
- Let Your Employee Run Terminal Commands: Once you pair the Sista desktop app, your employee can run real shell commands on your machine: git, npm, brew, ls, grep, and anything else you'd type yourself. Commands run as your own user with no privilege escalation, and a hard-coded blocklist rejects destructive patterns like rm -rf /, disk formatting, or piping a remote script into a shell before they ever execute.
- Let Your Employee See Your Screen: Your employee looks at your actual screen and works from what it sees, not just an API. It captures your desktop through the Sista desktop app, reads the pixels the same way you would, and can click, type, and scroll based on what it finds. That covers any app you have open, including native software, dashboards, and design tools that never had an integration.
- Employee Drive: Every document, generated image, video, screenshot, and daily work log an employee produces lands automatically in its Drive, no saving required. Browse it per employee, per team, or company-wide, as a searchable flat grid or as folders. Files preview inline, from PDFs and spreadsheets to code and video, so you rarely need to download something just to read it. Every update becomes a numbered version that you can preview or restore without losing the original file.