Guest Seats Explained: What a Guest Can and Cannot Do

A guest is a project workspace user with access to exactly one thing: the specific project someone invited them into. They can open it, read it, comment on it, and reply to @mentions inside it. They cannot browse the rest of the organization's projects, see billing, or find out the workspace exists at all beyond the one door they were handed a key to.

That definition matters because "guest" gets used loosely, as a stand-in for anyone outside the company, when in most project management software it's a specific, licensed role with its own allowance and its own limits. Mix it up with a full member seat or a one-off document share and you either overpay for access nobody needed or under-provision a client who actually needed to be inside the project.

In short. A guest seat gives someone standing, invited access to one project, comments included, without visibility into the rest of the workspace. Per Onplana's published plan limits (current as of September 2026), it is free up to the plan's allowance (2 on Starter and Pro, 5 on Business, 10 on Enterprise and Enterprise+, none on Free) and billed like a normal seat past that. A guest is not the same as a document share link, which needs no account and never touches the allowance, and it is not the same as a full member, who can be assigned work.

What a Guest User Is in Project Management Software

A guest sits between two other access modes, and confusing it with either one is the usual mistake:

• A document share is narrower: one file, no account, no login, revocable instantly. It never draws from a guest allowance because it never creates a user at all.
• A guest seat is a real, invited user with a login, scoped to one or more specific projects. They can comment, reply to mentions, and see the work inside those projects, but nothing outside them.
• A member seat is the full role: assignable work, visibility into resourcing and reporting for the projects they're part of, and (depending on permissions) a voice in decisions beyond commenting.

The distinction that trips people up most: a guest is a licensed identity, not a link. Someone has to be invited by email, they get a login, and their access persists until it's revoked, which is different from a share link that anyone holding the URL and the emailed code can open once and never needs an account for.

What a Guest Can and Cannot Do

Inside a project they've been invited to, a guest can typically:

1. View tasks, files, and the project's activity feed for that project only.
2. Comment and reply, including responding to an @mention that reached their inbox, email, or phone.
3. Open documents and see the Gantt or board view for that project, read-only in most role configurations.

A guest cannot:

1. See any other project in the workspace, even one owned by the same client contact on another engagement.
2. See billing, plan details, or the member roster beyond the people already visible inside the shared project.
3. Be assigned ongoing work as an owner, in the sense of carrying a task the way a full member does; a guest's role is built for visibility and comment, not accountability for a deliverable.

How Many Free Guest Seats Come With Each Plan

Guest seats are free up to an allowance that scales with plan tier, then billed like a member seat past it. This is plan data, not a feature gate, so it changes only when pricing changes:

Plan	Free guest seats
Free	0
Starter	2
Professional	2
Business	5
Enterprise	10
Enterprise+	10

The pattern worth noticing: Free has none at all. A workspace on the Free plan that needs to give a client visibility into a project has exactly one free option, a document share link, not a guest invite. That's a real product boundary, not an oversight, and it's the first thing to check before promising a prospective client "you'll be able to see everything" on a plan that hasn't been upgraded yet.

One detail Onplana's own billing documentation is explicit about and worth repeating here: the allowance tracks the role someone was actually given, not the label in your head. Invite someone as a Guest and they draw from the free allowance above; invite that same person as a Member instead, even for a client you think of as "just a guest," and it bills as a full seat regardless of what you call them in conversation.

The diagram below lines up the three access modes against what each one actually unlocks, since the right tool depends entirely on what the outside person needs to do, not just who they are.

When a Guest Is the Wrong Answer

A guest seat is the right tool less often than people reach for it. Three cases where it isn't:

1. The outside person only needs one file, once. A guest invite is overkill for a single budget document or status export. A document share link covers that with no account and no allowance spent, on every plan including Free.
2. The outside person needs to actually do the work. A contractor delivering tasks, not just reviewing them, needs a member seat so they can be assigned ownership; a guest can comment on a task but was never meant to carry one. Mixing all three access levels on one project is common enough on client engagements that it's worth deciding upfront who gets which.
3. A teammate already inside the organization needs into one more project. That's not a guest scenario at all; it's an internal permissions gap, and requesting access from the link itself is the faster fix than either a guest invite or a support ticket.

Getting this right at the start of a client engagement avoids two failure modes: paying for member seats a client never needed, or under-provisioning someone who actually needed to be inside the project rather than watching it from outside. The team collaboration overview covers how guests, members, and document shares fit together as one system rather than three separate decisions.