Google Workspace Guest Accounts: Collaborate Securely With Non-Workspace Users

Google Workspace is rolling out guest accounts, a new way to collaborate with people outside your organization who aren’t on Google Workspace. The feature is available across all Business and Enterprise editions, with admin controls rolling out through April 10, 2026 and end user capabilities following by April 16, 2026.

What are guest accounts?

When someone in your organization invites a non-Workspace user via a direct message or Chat Space in Google Chat, a guest account is automatically created for that external user. While Chat is the entry point, the guest account extends beyond it — once created, guests can collaborate across multiple Workspace apps:

• Google Chat — DMs and Spaces with your team
• Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides — Collaborate on existing files
• Google Drive — Access shared files and folders (they cannot create or own new files)
• Google Meet — Join calls initiated from Chat

Guests do not get access to Gmail, Google Calendar, or Gemini.

How it works

When an end user invites a non-Workspace external user in Chat, a guest account is provisioned within your domain with a unique identifier. The guest receives an email invitation to set up their account. After accepting the Terms of Service and acknowledging that data they access belongs to your organization, they can start collaborating.

Guest accounts are automatically placed in a dedicated “Workspace Guests” organizational unit in the Admin console. Your team will see a teal “external” label on guest accounts in Chat, similar to the yellow label used for external Workspace users.

Admin controls

Admins get full visibility and control over guest accounts:

• Manage who can invite guests — The feature is tied to your existing external chat settings. If external chatting is enabled, users can invite non-Workspace users by default. You can restrict this further with a dedicated guest invitation setting.
• Manage the guest lifecycle — View and manage all provisioned guest accounts in the Admin console and through APIs.
• Enforce security policies — Guest accounts start with secure defaults (no directory visibility, no third-party app access, no SSO). You can layer on additional policies like 2-step verification, context-aware access, DLP, and Vault retention depending on your edition.

Your organization retains full ownership of all data created and shared when collaborating with guest accounts.

Limits and availability

You get 5 free guest accounts for every paid Workspace license. So if your organization has 20 licenses, you can have up to 100 guest accounts.

Guest accounts are only created for non-Workspace external users. Collaboration with existing Workspace users and consumer Google accounts works the same as before and doesn’t require guest accounts.

What this means for your business

If you regularly work with contractors, vendors, or clients who aren’t on Google Workspace, this is a significant improvement over the previous options. Instead of sharing files with personal Gmail accounts or relying on email-only communication, you can bring external collaborators into your Workspace environment under your security policies. They get a structured, managed account rather than ad-hoc access.

As a Google Workspace partner, we stay up to date on all of the updates that come to Google Workspace. Reach out to find out how we can help you with Google Workspace management and deployment.