User roles & permissions

What are user groups, roles, and permissions in Guru?

Guru’s permissioning framework is designed to scale with your team’s needs while ensuring secure, streamlined knowledge access and management. Whether you’re organizing a fast-growing sales org, managing product documentation, or refining internal support processes, Guru makes it easy to give the right people the right level of access without the headaches.

User roles define what an individual can do in Guru, while groups simplify access management by allowing you to assign permissions at scale. Together, these tools create a powerful governance strategy that keeps your content accurate, accessible, and securely shared without requiring admin oversight at every step.

User roles and what they can do

Admin

Full access to all Guru settings, content, permissions, user management, and integrations. Admins can edit or override anything.

Workspace Owner

Elevated access that sits between Admin and Author. Owners can create and manage Custom Pages, Knowledge Agents, collections, and connected sources without needing full Admin privileges.

Author

Can create and edit content in assigned Guru collections, and can edit Custom Pages.

Expert

Can view and refine specific questions asked to Knowledge Agents they have editing access to.

Read Only

Can access and view content they’ve been granted permissions to, but cannot create, edit, or manage any content or settings.

User groups: manage access at scale

User Groups let you assign roles and permissions across collections and Pages at scale—ideal for onboarding, re-orgs, or shifting team needs.

Groups in Guru can be created manually or automatically provisioned through SCIM when using SSO. For bulk management, groups can be easily managed by Admins to add or remove users at scale. Once set up, permissions can be assigned and managed per group in various places, like Collections, Pages, connected sources, and Knowledge Agents, making access control easy to maintain as your organization grows.

Permissioning at every level

Guru gives you the control to decide who can see, create, and manage content—no matter where that content lives in the platform. Every part of Guru can have its own set of permissions, so you can tailor access to fit your team’s needs.

Collections

Collections are the main containers for your team’s knowledge. They typically group content by department, topic, or function. You can decide who can view content in a Collection, who can contribute, and who can manage it.

Custom Pages

Pages are where you organize information in a more visual, navigable format—like a homepage. You can control who can view or edit each Page, making it easy to share information broadly or keep certain content private.

Knowledge Agents

Knowledge Agents are AI-powered tools that help your team find and generate answers automatically. You can manage who can use, edit, or set up these Agents depending on their role.

Connected sources

Sources are external tools (like Slack, Google Drive, or Box) that you can connect to Guru to bring in content your team already uses. When setting up a source, you can choose to use inherited permissions, which means Guru will respect the access settings already in place in the original tool. That way, people in Guru will only be able to view content they already have access to, without needing to manually reconfigure permissions in both places. On top of that, Guru still applies its own role-based permissions, so access can be further managed and refined within Guru itself, giving you layered control over who sees what.

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Knowledge Agents & AI answers

Custom Pages



Collections & folders

Publishing workflows


Guru’s content editor