3.1 Accounts, Organizations, and Enterprise Options

Why GH-900 starts with accounts

Domain 1 of GitHub Foundations (GH-900) spends 25–30% of the exam on Git and GitHub basics. After version control, the outline asks you to describe GitHub accounts, organizations, and enterprise options. That bullet is not a pricing trivia dump. It tests whether you can tell who signs in, who owns the work, and which plan unlocks a feature when a scenario mentions private-repository protections, SAML, or a self-hosted appliance.

GitHub is a collaboration platform that hosts Git repositories plus Issues, pull requests, Actions, Packages, Codespaces, and more. Accounts are how GitHub organizes and controls access to that code. If you mix up a personal login with an organization, or treat GitHub Team as an account type, the rest of Domain 1 (GitHub Flow, Markdown, Desktop, Mobile) still works technically—but you will miss questions that ask where a setting lives.

Three account types

GitHub documents exactly three account types:

1. User accounts. Every person who uses GitHub signs in to a user account. That account is your identity: a username, a profile, and the actor attached to issues, reviews, and commits you make through GitHub. User accounts can own repositories, packages, and projects. GitHub also allows machine user accounts that exist to automate work such as continuous integration, but those are still user accounts, not a fourth type.
2. Organization accounts. An organization is a shared account where many people collaborate across many projects. Like a user, an organization can own repositories, packages, and projects. Unlike a user, you cannot sign in to an organization. Each person signs in as a user; membership maps that user into the org. Members can be grouped into teams—nested sub-groups that mirror a company structure and simplify repository access. Organizations are limited to 100,000 repositories; additional work goes into additional organizations.
3. Enterprise accounts. GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Server include enterprise accounts. An enterprise account lets administrators centrally manage policy and billing for multiple organizations and enable InnerSource between those organizations.

Two flavors of user account matter on the exam:

• A personal account is the one you create when you sign up on GitHub.com. It uses GitHub Free or GitHub Pro. Personal accounts may own unlimited public and private repositories with unlimited collaborators. On Free, private repositories have a limited feature set; Pro unlocks the advanced private-repo toolset.
• A managed user account is created for you by an enterprise that uses Enterprise Managed Users (EMU). Some profile details are controlled by the enterprise. You must sign in as that managed user to reach the enterprise's organizations and repositories. You can create your own private repositories, but you cannot create public content or contribute outside the enterprise.

Exam trap: GitHub Team is a plan billed per user, not a fourth account type. Teams inside an organization are a feature of organizations. Do not treat "Team" as something you sign in to.

Personal vs organization vs enterprise

Think in layers. The user account is the identity that authenticates. The organization is the collaboration container that owns shared repositories and applies roles (owner, member, billing manager, and others you will study in Domain 6). The enterprise is the administration container that sits above one or more organizations.

If your employer uses SAML single sign-on (SSO) on a regular organization that is not an EMU enterprise, you still sign in with your personal account. GitHub links that personal account to your identity in the organization's identity provider (IdP). EMU is the other model: the enterprise provisions the username, you authenticate at the IdP, and the managed user is fenced inside the enterprise. Domain 6 covers EMU policy in depth; Domain 1 only needs this high-level fork in the road.

You can belong to many organizations at once. Actions you take on organization resources are still attributed to your user account. That is why an audit log shows @you, not octo-org, as the actor.

Plans: Free, Pro, Free for organizations, Team, Enterprise Cloud, Enterprise Server

Plans are not the same thing as account types. A personal account sits on Free or Pro. An organization sits on Free for organizations, Team, or is pulled up into Enterprise. GitHub publishes the current included quotas in GitHub's plans.

GitHub Free for personal accounts is more generous than many candidates expect. You get unlimited public repositories with a full feature set and unlimited private repositories with a limited feature set, unlimited collaborators, GitHub Community Support, Dependabot alerts, two-factor authentication enforcement, 500 MB GitHub Packages storage, 120 GitHub Codespaces core hours and 15 GB Codespaces storage per month, 2,000 GitHub Actions minutes per month, and GitHub Pages on public repositories. The exam-friendly sentence is: Free is not "public only." Free is "private allowed, advanced private tools withheld."

GitHub Pro is the personal paid upgrade. On top of Free it adds email support, 3,000 Actions minutes, 2 GB Packages storage, 180 Codespaces core hours, 20 GB Codespaces storage, and the advanced private-repository toolkit: required pull request reviewers, multiple reviewers, protected branches, code owners, auto-linked references, GitHub Pages, wikis, and repository insights graphs (Pulse, contributors, traffic, commits, code frequency, network, forks). Publishing a Pages site privately still requires an organization on GitHub Enterprise Cloud—Pro does not unlock private Pages by itself.

GitHub Free for organizations is the shared-account Free tier. You still get unlimited collaborators on unlimited public repos (full features) and unlimited private repos (limited features). The distinctive org-level extra versus a personal Free account is team access controls for grouping members. Actions minutes remain 2,000 per month. Do not invent a fictional "organization Pro" plan; the paid org steps are Team and Enterprise.

GitHub Team is billed per user. It includes email support, 3,000 Actions minutes, 2 GB Packages storage, the option to purchase GitHub Advanced Security products (GitHub Code Security and GitHub Secret Protection), and the advanced private-repo toolset plus team pull request reviewers, scheduled reminders, and a security overview. Organization owners can enable or disable Codespaces and decide who pays. GitHub Actions minutes on standard GitHub-hosted runners are free for public repositories; private repositories consume the plan quota, then bill overage.

GitHub Enterprise is the umbrella name for two deployment options, and GH-900 will make you pick the right one from a one-line scenario.

Enterprise Cloud vs Enterprise Server

GitHub Enterprise Cloud is hosted by GitHub. GitHub runs the service, offers a 99.9% monthly uptime SLA, includes 50,000 GitHub Actions minutes per month on standard GitHub-hosted runners and 50 GB Packages storage, and lets you centrally manage policy and billing for multiple organizations through an enterprise account. Cloud-only options include Enterprise Managed Users, audit log streaming, IP allow lists, and hosting company data in a specific region on a unique subdomain. Extra enterprise features on top of Team include GitHub Enterprise Support, additional security and compliance controls, authentication with SAML single sign-on, access provisioning with SAML or SCIM, deployment protection rules for private or internal repositories, GitHub Connect, internal repositories, and repository rules.

GitHub Enterprise Server is self-hosted. Your staff install and operate the GitHub appliance (on your hardware or your cloud account). GitHub does not host that instance. Server still gives you enterprise administration, but you own uptime, backups, upgrades, and how runners and package storage are provided. A one-line exam discriminator is: if the scenario says "we cannot put source code on github.com" or "we run GitHub in our data center," the product is Enterprise Server. If the scenario says "GitHub hosts it" or mentions the 99.9% SLA or EMUs on github.com/GHE.com, the product is Enterprise Cloud.

Internal repositories exist as a third visibility next to public and private, and they are an Enterprise capability. Internal means visible to enterprise members without making the repo public on the internet. Candidates who only remember public versus private will miss that option.

SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) single sign-on and SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) provisioning are called out in GitHub's plans as Enterprise features. GitHub Team does not get you SAML/SCIM. If a question lists "SSO with SAML and automated account provisioning," the plan is GitHub Enterprise, not Team.

EMU at Domain 1 altitude

Enterprise Managed Users (EMUs) are an Enterprise Cloud option in which an IdP—commonly Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, or PingFederate—provisions new user accounts and users authenticate at the IdP to reach enterprise resources. The IdP controls usernames, profile data, and can drive organization membership. Managed users cannot create public content or collaborate outside the enterprise. Domain 6 asks you to explain EMU purpose and Copilot policy in more detail. On Domain 1, remember only: EMU is how an enterprise owns the user lifecycle instead of linking employees' personal GitHub.com accounts.

Exam scenarios and traps

• "Unlimited private repos on Free" is true; "protected branches on those private repos on Free" is often false. Public repositories keep a full feature set even on Free.
• You never sign in as octo-org. You sign in as @you and act inside the org.
• GitHub Team is per-user billing with advanced private tools; it is not SAML, SCIM, internal repos, or a 99.9% SLA.
• Enterprise Cloud versus Server is a hosting question, not a feature-branding question. Both are "GitHub Enterprise." Cloud is GitHub-hosted; Server is self-hosted.
• Private GitHub Pages is not a Pro personal perk; GitHub's docs require an organization on Enterprise Cloud to publish Pages privately.
• Do not spend Domain 1 memorizing every EMU IdP matrix. Know that an IdP provisions and authenticates managed users and that those users are walled inside the enterprise.

GH-900 will phrase this as short stories: a freelancer on Free, a startup on Team that wants required reviewers on private repos, a bank that needs SAML and internal repos, a factory that must keep GitHub off the public cloud. Match the story to the account layer and the plan, then move on.