Private and Public Projects

YouTrack supports both private and public projects.

• A public project is a project that can be viewed by at least one user. You cannot restrict the visibility of the project.

• A private project is a project to which you can restrict reading access to any user. You are able to hide a private project from all other users in the system.

The visibility for a project is affected by the status of the guest user account.

In the free subscription plan for YouTrack, the guest user is always enabled. You cannot ban or delete this account.

The guest user always has Read Issue and Read Comment permissions in all projects by default. These permissions cannot be revoked.
These permissions allow guest users to:

• View any issue (public fields only).

• View comments that do not have have visibility restrictions.

As a result, private projects are not supported for the free subscription plan. All projects are public.

With the commercial plan, you can ban guest user accounts. This option lets you set up private projects. To learn how to manage access for guest users, see Manage the Guest User Account.