Can I creare a private organization?

[akulik512]

Hello Everyone!
I see that I can create organization but it looks like a public. Yes, I can make my repositories private, hide team and other but can I create a fully private organization? So that my organization was hidden everywhere. I talk about a feature like the Group on GitLab or Project/Workspace on BitBucket.
Maybe it paid feature and I should buy Team or Enterprise when creating an organization?
I really love Open Source but I write a web application and opened sources can be dangerous for me.

[canuckjacq]

👋 Welcome!

You’re right - we don’t have fully private organisations, but I think you might still be able to accomplish what you want with a couple settings.

1. You can name your organisation anything you want, including totally random characters, so that it’s unlikely anyone will guess it and go straight to the URL. It’s not likely anyone is going to go to github.com/uuurygveryrandomorgname9865vtttk by chance.

2. You can hide your organisation membership so that nobody can see that you are a member of this organisation.

In this way, the organisation itself isn’t private, but to find it, people would have to know the name of it - they wouldn’t discover it from your profile page, or just by the the name of a project.

As long as your repositories are also private, none of your work will be viewed by anyone who you don’t explicitly give access to either.

[Alceatraz]

2. You can hide your organisation membership so that nobody can see that you are a member of this organisation.

But Organizations still apper on my profile after i change to private member, Is there anyway to hide it ?

[nesk]

They appear only because you're authenticated. Try to view your profile in a private browsing session.

[midosvt]

1. You can name your organisation anything you want, including totally random characters, so that it’s unlikely anyone will guess it and go straight to the URL. It’s not likely anyone is going to go to github.com/uuurygveryrandomorgname9865vtttk by chance.

Let's say we go with that. Imagine a scenario where I have a developer, and something happens and he gets fired or leaves. What's stopping him from leaking the name of the organization? That's just one possibility, and there are plenty of other reasons why doing this would be pointless.

[akulik512]

@canuckjacq thx a lot for your so quick and good answer!

[mendax1234]

Does Github support private organization now? l think it is a important function.

[mfromer]

Hi @canuckjacq - indeed, this is a feature that I would indeed request as well!

[selvmaya]

I just want a way to manage the hosting of several repositories under a common topic. Is a public organization the only way to do this on GitHub?

[BadPracticeIO]

This needs to be a feature if people have been asking for this long. Some companies that now want to utilize Enterprise would like to be able to be able to categorize their organizations and repositories but still keep it looking professional during audits and pushing code with many teams.

[oscark22]

I hope they add this feature in the future.

[rileydrizzy]

HI Everyone, I need your help please @canuckjacq
I need help configuring some settings. I have an organization account with a team created in it. The team is assigned to two private repositories. I want the team members to have full access to these repositories, including the ability to clone, write, push, and pull. I've tried adjusting various settings but haven't been able to get it to work. Any guidance would be appreciated!

[stagekart-devops]

Need this feature definitely and desperately. An organization is proprietary and Github should respect that by giving exact same control at their software level.
Organizations should be able to be made fully private or hidden - not some stupid random name hack.

[0xsquarelaw]

Yes, this is definitely a must-needed feature.

[noor-malaika]

@canuckjacq whats the point of hiding membership if people can see it in a profile?

[mattkenefick]

Surprised this is still not a thing. There's no setting in an organization to make it private to non-organization members?

[midosvt]

I don't see any point in repeating what's already been said in the replies above, but it still doesn't make sense why this isn't a thing by now. Is there a reason for it, or could at least a statement or explanation be provided?

[kg4zow]

Short answer, it's all about money. Microsoft (who owns Github, if you weren't aware) thinks that privacy is something people should have to pay for.

There are other things that organizations cannot do unless they're part of a paid account, including ...

• Prevent members from creating public repos, unless you'ure using "GitHub Enterprise Cloud" (which currently "starts at" $21/mo per user).
• Create private Github Pages sites, again unless you're using "GitHub Enterprise Cloud". (For private sites, anybody viewing the site has to be logged into a Github account with at least "read" permissions on the repo containing the site's content.)
• Set up Rulesets, unless you're paying for "GitHub Team" (currently $4/mo per user) or higher. We use these at $DAYJOB to enforce rules like "all commit messages must start with a ticket number" and "all commits must be signed". (Apparently they're doing away with the "branch protection rules" mechanism at some point, and these are going to replace them.)

$DAYJOB does have an enterprise account, and these are all features that we make use of on a daily basis. I'm sure there are other "paid only" features, but these are the things I personally have noticed being available for my work repos but not for my personal repos.

Also... as others have pointed out, you can get pretty close to having a private organization by carefully managing settings. This includes ...

• Using a "long and ugly" org name that people are unlikely to guess. (Although once the name "escapes", it's out there forever.)
• Limiting the information on the org's profile.
• Making sure all of the org's repos are flagged as "private". You can't prevent public repos from being created, but you can write a script that an "org owner" can run to set all of the org's repos to private when somebody forgets.

[michasacuer]

Hello, is it still a thing? Can i make my organization fully private?

[kg4zow]

Hello, is it still a thing? Can i make my organization fully private?

As I explained above, NO.

• The URL https://github.com/ORGNAME/ is always going to point to something, which means people will always be able to tell that an organization exists with that name.
• Github's web interface will not show the names of any private repos under the organization.
• The list of organization members can be hidden, as detailed above.

As a concrete example, I "own" an organization called "jms1org", as a normal Github user (not paying any monthly fees to Github). Right now (2026-04) it's not being used for anything, so feel free to poke at it with a stick.

• At the moment, I am the only user in the organization. The setting that makes the member list visible to the public is turned off, so you can't tell that from the organization's main page. If there were other members, and I had turned on public visibility, you'd see them on the list on the lower right. You can also tell that the only public repo in the org is the .github repo, which contains the README.md file used on the organization's main page.

• For the sake of this discussion, I have created a repo called hidden. As a non-member, you wouldn't be able to find out that a repo with that name exists, and even knowing the name, you can't access it. This is a screenshot of what I see when I look at it:

  

  For the sake of people in the future, I make no guarantee that I won't delete this repo the next time I need to use the organization for a project. But to be fair, unless you're a member of the organization, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway. 😎

---

FWIW, I use my own git repo servers, hosted on my own machines, for repos that I want to be sure are not accessible or discover-able by the unwashed masses. I use the following software for this:

• Gitolite, which just hosts the repos and does not have a user-facing web interface like Github. It uses SSH to access the repos. The docs do contain directions on how to make the repos accessible over HTTP(S), however I personally trust SSH a lot more than I trust HTTPS, so I've never even tried setting up HTTPS access to my repos.

  I run this on a Linux VPS whose sshd is configured to only allow key-based authentication, so even if somebody guesses a password, they still can't get in.

• Gitea, which does have a fancy web interface and supports things like pull requests. It's written in Go, the program consists of a single executable file (which I have installed as /usr/local/bin/gitea) and an /etc/gitea/app.ini file. It took me less than ten minutes to set it up the first time, and I've had zero problems with it ever since.

  I run this on a Linux machine within my house, which means it's only accessible from within the house, or while I'm connected to my home VPN.

I'm not sure what problem you're trying to solve, but hopefully some of what I've explained will prove helpful.