In a small team, everyone seeing every workflow is a feature. Anyone can open the invoice workflow, read what it does and fix it while the finance lead is on vacation. As a workspace grows, that stops being true of everything. The payroll workflow carries salaries. The workflow HR uses for a disciplinary case shouldn't be one click away for the whole company. And the sales team doesn't need IT's offboarding steps cluttering its list.
Until now, roles were how you drew those lines, and a role applies across the whole workspace: someone who can edit workflows can edit all of them. On Pro and Enterprise, you can now also choose who can reach each folder, workflow, document and app on its own.
How it works
On the Workflows page, open the menu on a folder, a workflow, a document or an app and choose Manage access. There are two choices:
- Everyone in the workspace. Anyone in the workspace can open it, and their role decides what they can do. This is where everything starts.
- Restricted. Only the people and roles you add can reach it. Nobody else will see that it exists.
Add people one at a time, or a whole role, such as everyone with your Finance role, and give each one Can view or Can edit. When you restrict something, you're added to it as an editor, so you don't lock yourself out.
Folders do most of the work
Restrict a folder and everything in it is restricted too. Put payroll, expenses and the month-end report in a Finance folder, share the folder with your Finance role, and you've drawn the line once. A workflow saved into that folder later follows the folder.
From there you can go narrower or wider, one item at a time:
- Narrower. Restrict one workflow inside a shared folder, and only the people on that workflow can reach it.
- Wider. Add someone to just one workflow inside a restricted folder, such as a bookkeeper you've invited who needs the month-end report and nothing else, and they get that one thing.
Sharing and roles work together
Both have to allow something before it happens. Someone who can only view a workflow can't run, edit or delete it, whatever their role says. And sharing never gives a person more than their role allows: a Viewer you add with Can edit still can't change anything, because Viewers can't.
That keeps the two easy to reason about. Roles answer "what kind of work does this person do?" Sharing answers "which of our workflows is any of their business?" Custom roles, on Pro and Enterprise, let you build a role from just the permissions a job needs, and a role can be added to a folder as easily as a person.
No back doors
A restriction would mean little if the workflow could still be reached some other way. So everything that touches a workflow follows its access:
- Its runs. Someone who can't reach a workflow doesn't see its runs either.
- Its approvals and comments, and what the audit log shows about it.
- API keys and AI tools. A Developer API key, or an AI tool such as Claude or ChatGPT connected to Lodol, acts as the person who set it up, so it reaches only what that person can.
To anyone who can't reach it, a restricted workflow answers "not found", in the app, through the Developer API and to their AI tool alike. That's deliberate. A workflow's name is information, and so is the fact that it exists.
Someone can always get in
Owners and admins can open every folder and item, whatever its sharing says. That's what stops a restricted workflow being stranded when everyone it was shared with has left: someone can always get in and hand it on. A restricted item with nobody on it yet can be opened only by owners and admins.
Changing who can access something takes edit access to it, and a role that can edit workflows. Each change is recorded in the audit log, with who made it.
Two kinds of private
They're easy to mix up, so here's the difference:
| Who | What they can see of a new workflow |
|---|---|
| People outside your workspace | Nothing. Every new workflow starts private, on every plan, until someone who can edit it makes it public with a preview link. |
| People in your workspace | Everything their role allows, until you restrict it with Manage access. |
Manage access only ever narrows things inside your workspace. It never shows anything to anyone outside it.
Where it fits
A few situations where teams reach for it first:
- Payroll and pay data. A Finance folder only Finance can open, so salaries in a run's data stay with the people who handle them.
- HR cases. A restricted folder for the workflows that touch individual employees.
- A contractor's corner. Someone you've brought in for one project sees that project's folder, and the rest of the workspace doesn't exist for them.
- A tidy list. Each team sees the workflows it works on, rather than everyone's.
What it's on
Restricting who can access a folder or item is part of the Pro and Enterprise plans, alongside custom roles and the audit log. Pro starts at $120 a month for 10,000 runs, and seats are unlimited on every plan, so adding the bookkeeper or the contractor costs nothing. On Free and Builder, everything in a workspace stays open to everyone in it, and roles decide what each person can do. Compare plans on the pricing page.
Draw the line once, at the folder.
On the Workflows page, choose Manage access on the folder that needs it and add the people and roles who should see inside. Read more about roles and what each can do, see how Lodol keeps keys and access safe on the security page, or talk with our team about setting it up for a larger workspace.