While tenant roles determine what you can do across the entire tenant, team roles determine what you can do within a specific team. Every user in a team must be assigned a team role. In this section, we'll explore the default team roles in Tines and when to use each one, as well as how to create a custom role for tenants who have the feature included in their plan.
Understand the default team roles
Tines provides default team roles, each designed for different levels of access and responsibility within a team. Choosing the right role for each user depends on what they need to accomplish and how much control they should have over team components.
Here's an overview of the five roles, from most to least permissive:
Team admin: Full control over the team, including the ability to manage members, configure settings, and perform destructive actions like deleting workflows or credentials.
Editor: Can create and edit workflows, credentials, and resources, but cannot delete them or manage team membership.
Viewer: Read-only access to workflows and results. Perfect for stakeholders who need visibility without the ability to make changes.
Case manager: Specialized role for users who work exclusively with cases. They can create and manage cases but have restricted access to other team objects like workflows and credentials.
Workbench user: The most restricted role, designed for users who only need to run preconfigured presets through Tines Workbench.
Let's dive deeper into each role and when to use them.
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Team admin
The team admin role gives a user unrestricted read and write permissions to all objects within a team. This includes workflows (stories), credentials, resources, folders, and team settings. Team admins are essentially the managers of their team.
When to use this role: Assign the team admin role to team leads, managers, or trusted senior members who need full control over the team's environment. This role is ideal for people who are responsible for the overall health and organization of the team.
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Editor
The editor role is the most common role for users who actively build and run workflows. Editors have read and write permissions to most objects on the team, but unlike team admins, they cannot perform destructive actions or manage team membership.
When to use this role: The editor role is perfect for your workflow builders. These are the people who will be creating and maintaining your intelligent workflow day-to-day. Most active users on a team should have the editor role.
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Viewer
The viewer role provides read-only access to most objects on a team. Viewers can see workflows, view results, and understand how the workflow is running, but they cannot make any changes.
When to use this role: The viewer role is perfect for auditors, stakeholders, executives, or anyone who needs oversight without the ability to alter workflows. It's also useful for new team members who are still learning and need to observe before they start building.
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Case manager
The case manager role is designed specifically for users who work with Tines Cases (a feature for managing incidents, tickets, or investigations) but don't need access to the underlying workflows or platform features.
When to use this role: The case manager role is ideal for frontline workers who need to respond to cases but don't need to understand or modify the workflow that creates or routes those cases. This keeps the interface simple for them and reduces the risk of accidental changes to workflows.
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Workbench user
The Workbench user role is the most restricted team role. It's designed for users who only need to run pre-configured workflows (called presets) through Tines Workbench, without accessing any other part of the platform.
When to use this role: The Workbench user role is perfect for end users who need to trigger specific automations but don't need (or want) to interact with the Tines platform itself. This role provides a simplified, button-click experience for running workflows enabled for Workbench.
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Custom roles
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Beyond the default team roles, Tines offers custom roles that allow you to create highly granular permission structures tailored to your organization's needs. Custom roles give you fine-grained control over what users can do within teams.
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As a tenant owner, you can create and manage custom roles:
Navigate to the tenant Settings via the team menu.
Navigate to Roles.
You can view your current custom roles via the Custom roles section.
Click the + New role button to create a new custom role.
✋ Try this: Create a custom role
You can turn individual features on or off to create the exact permission set you need. Each feature has different permission levels:
View permissions: Allow users to see information but not interact with it.
Write permissions: Allow users to update information but not perform destructive or permissive actions (like adding members or changing permissions).
Manage permissions: Allow users to move objects, change permissions, or perform destructive actions like deleting.
Once you've created a custom role, you can assign it to users just like you would assign a default role. Users can have different custom roles in different teams, giving you maximum flexibility in how you structure access across your tenant.
Assign users to teams with roles
Now that you understand the different team roles (including custom roles if your tenant has them enabled), let's walk through how to assign users to teams and choose the appropriate role for them.
You can assign users to teams in two ways:
During the invitation process: When you invite a new user to the tenant, you can immediately assign them to a team and select their role. This is the most efficient approach when you know exactly where the user should be placed.
After the user has joined the tenant: If you invited a user without assigning them to a team, or if you need to add an existing user to a new team, you can do so from the team's Members page.