You can collaborate and set permission levels for team members and projects in Descript in many ways. This document provides drive owners information about drives and workspaces, team members, and project access, and recommendations for managing your teams and collaborations.

Drives and workspaces

What is a drive?

A drive are where projects are created, stored, and managed in Descript. Drives can consist of a single member or multiple users collaborating across one or more projects. You will interact with your drive from the Drive view. Learn more about the Drive view.

A drive is automatically created and linked to your account when you create a Descript account. You can purchase additional drives and create or belong to as many drives as you like. We recommend using multiple drives for each team or for productions that need specific privacy settings and members. 

What is a workspace?

Workspaces allow you to manage the privacy of your projects within a drive. This is helpful if you share the drive with a team. Every drive member has access to the two workspaces in their drive:

• Drive workspace — projects stored here are visible to all drive members, making projects easily accessible and collaborative amongst drive members.
• Private workspace — projects stored here are private and only visible to the individual team member. It's a useful space for storing projects that shouldn't or don't need to be shared with any other user; or if you want to provide project access only to a few collaborators.

How should I organize projects in drives and workspaces?

We recommend this project organization:

• Use folders on the Drive workspace if there are no privacy concerns. 
• Use the Private workspace to store projects that shouldn't be shared with any other drive members, or that only needs to be shared with a select set of users (this can be done by providing project access).
• Use multiple drives when separate teams or productions need specific privacy settings and members. 

Drive members

Members are individual users that can collaborate on projects in a shared drive. The drive owner can add or remove members and assign them permission-based roles.

Membership types

There are three types of drive members: the drive owner, editors, basic, and viewer. Each has different types of permissions. Click to learn more about drive member types.

Adding new members

Drive members can invite other members to join the drive. The type of members a team member can invite will depend on their own drive membership:

Keep in mind that adding editor members to your drive will increase your subscription cost. As the drive owner, you can enable manually approval of editor membership invitations. 

Paid seats

A seat represents an individual editor-level seat on the drive. When you purchase a Hobbyist, Creator, or Business subscription for your drive, you select the seats to purchase, then assign them to members or guests. Note that a paid seat will be added to your drive subscription anytime you invite a new editor member.

Removing drive members

Only the drive owner can remove members from the drive. Learn how to remove members.

Drive admins

Admins are editors or basic members who have been given additional drive, project, and membership management capabilities. Either the drive owner or other drive admins. There's no limit on the number of drive members who can be assigned as admins. Learn more about assigning drive admins.

Project access and ownership

Project Ownership

The drive member who creates the project will be the default project owner. Project owners have more project permissions. Specifically, they can:

• Change access permissions of the project
• Transfer ownership to another editor drive member
• Rename the project
• Duplicate the project
• Move the project
• Delete the project

In a private workspace, only the project creator will be considered the owner with full project permissions. However, if the project is created in a drive workspace, both the workspace owner and any admins will also be considered owners and will have the same project permissions as the project creator.

Project access

Project access allows you to invite collaborators, even non-drive members, to specific projects and set permission levels for the projects. Learn more about setting project access and inviting collaborators.

• You can provide access to projects on your private workspace to limit the project to a select group of drive members.
• You can invite other Descript users to collaborate on individual projects without inviting them to the drive. 

Levels of project access

There are three permission levels of project access you can set for drive members and collaborators.

Can edit — users can edit the project without restrictions.

Can comment — users can only view and playback the project, leave comments, copy share links, and copy project content.

Cannot access — this will move the project to your Private workspace on the drive.

Who can adjust project access permissions?

Drive owners, project owners, and editor members with "Can edit" permissions can give other users access to the project.

Tips and best practices

There are a lot of ways you can collaborate on projects in Descript. Here are some suggestions for sharing your Descript content with collaborators:

• Invite someone to be a drive member if they are long-term collaborators or need access to many projects on the drive. Learn how to invite drive members.
• If you want to restrict access to a project, keep it on your private workspace and provide project access to Descript users or drive members as needed. Learn how to provide project access.
• If you need to share and get feedback on a version of your content with a non-Descript user, consider sharing a published page link with them. Learn how to publish your content.