First Steps
You can say what a member is, what a guest is, and why nobody can be made a second administrator.
**A member is anyone in a project, the owner included. A guest is a member who is not the owner.**
There is no third role. Guest is not a lesser kind of member sitting alongside owner — it is simply what every member other than the owner is called.
| | **Owner** | **Guest** | | ----------------------------------- | ------------------- | ---------- | | how many | exactly one, always | any number | | open the project and work in it | yes | yes | | open Project Settings | yes | **no** | | rename, archive, delete the project | yes | no | | add or remove guests | yes | no |
Your role is in the projects list, in the **Role** column, and it is per project — owner of one, guest on another, at the same time.
**A project has exactly one owner and no second administrator.** There is no way to promote a guest, no "co-owner", and no permission to grant that gets someone halfway.
What exists instead is **handing the role over**. Ownership moves from one person to another — and whoever hands it over becomes a guest on their own project. It is a transfer, not a share.
That is worth stating plainly because the natural assumption is that a busy owner can deputise someone. They cannot. If two people need to administer a production, that is a conversation about who owns it, not a setting.
Being in a project is not the same as being able to see everything in it. A guest is in the project; which of its budgets and plans actually reach them is a separate question — see [what a guest can see](/kb/article/how-sharing-works).
Being added to a project is not the same as being given its contents, and confusing the two is the usual reason someone reports that sharing "did not work".
Being a guest gets you three things: the project appears in your list with **Guest** in the Role column, you can open it, and you can work in whatever reaches you and save.
It does **not** get you the project's settings — no renaming, archiving, deleting or managing who else is on it — and it does not get you every budget and plan inside. A project can hold many documents; being in the project does not by itself hand you all of them.
That second point is the one worth being precise about. **What data actually reaches a guest is decided by sharing**, which is its own subject. The project is the room; sharing is what is on the table.
Even where a document has been shared with editing access, editing it needs a licence that allows editing — a Free licence can look and not change. So before a guest can alter anything:
1. They are in the project. 2. The document has been shared with them, with editing access. 3. Their licence permits editing — see [what your licence includes](/kb/article/what-your-licence-includes).
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