At the moment the access controls are quite limited, and entirely on the user side, rather than the content side. The only controls are whether a user can see their contacts, their team's contacts, or all contacts.
Sometimes you want a contact/company/deal to only be visible to certain people (e.g. their owner), and currently there is no way of doing that. You can utilise teams to make it so that all contacts assigned to a person or team are only visible to that person or team, but there is no way for this to be set on a per contact basis.
This feature would make it much easier to control access and improve security and compliance. When combined with email logging, it will also help avoid people seeing emails that they shouldn't.
Thanks for sharing this idea and for the thoughtful discussion here — we agree that controlling access to sensitive records is an important use case.
Today, there are a couple of ways you can manage record visibility in HubSpot:
1. Set record permissions to “Owned only” You can configure object permissions (contacts, companies, deals, etc.) so that users are set to see only records they own. With this setting enabled, records are visible to their owners and super admins. A record can have multiple owners or be shared with additional users, meaning more than one user with “Owned only” permissions can still access the same record.
2. Use the “Shared with” users property When permissions are set to “Owned only,” record access isn’t limited to a single person. Owners can use the Shared with users property to explicitly grant access to other specific users, allowing for collaboration while still keeping the record private from the wider team.
That said, we recognize that these options don’t cover every scenario. We do see opportunities to make it easier and more flexible to limit access to specific records for specific users or groups, without relying primarily on ownership. This is an area we’re considering as part of future planning.
We really appreciate everyone taking the time to share feedback and real-world use cases here — it helps shape where we focus next.
Hi all - thank you so much for your feedback on this! I'm Amanda and I'm the new product manager on permissions at HubSpot. We are currently researching how to best handle record access (ie Contacts/Companies/Deals/Tickets/Custom Objects) and would love to chat with you and show you some ideas. If you're willing to spend 45 minutes with me helping shape the future of permissions, you can book time here: https://www.hubspot.com/meetings/ambaker1/record-permissions-feedback
"As an Enterprise client, this is one of the most limiting and frustrating missed opportunities in HubSpot. The fact that you only have the four options (Everything, Team only, Owned only, and None) is incredibly frustrating and then you can only add someone to 5 teams makes it practically unusable by our Business Development teams. If I have a BDM who works in 7 markets and another who only works in 3 and they are on a team together then the person who only needs 3 will see everything from the BDM who has 7! That's ridiculous."
This is a must. Customer Privacy and control is more important than ever. So many of your customers will be managing sensitive information and need this.
This idea wa sposted 2020 and has 79 upvotes - is it possible to get a status from Hubspot on where this fits to your roadmap?
We are struggeling big time with this, as the only possibility today is be restricting on the user side (as mentioned in the original idea). However, user groups are also connected to reporting, and these 2 dont always match. Quite often we have sensitive customers we only need to make available to certain users, and hide from all the rest. This segmentation is available in other functionality (properties, reports), so I can imagine it would not be a huge thing to implement. To be able to navigate to a specific contact/company and restrict specifically that this object is only to be seen by x team or x person.
As an Enterprise client this is one of the most limiting and frustrating missed opportunities in HubSpot. The fact that you only have the four options (Everything, Team only, Owned only, and None) is incredibly frustrating and then you can only add someone to 5 teams makes it practically unusable by our Business Development teams. If I have a BDM who works in 7 markets and another who only works in 3 and they are on a team together then the person who only needs 3 will see everything from the BDM who has 7! That's ridiculous.
We need this function for many of our clients, as we could use this for our HR teams to silo their contacts from the sales contacts.
I desperately need this feature! I want to send confidential emails to staff and vendors without other staff in Hubspot seeing the history or contact. I would really like to see a "confidentiality" feature added.
This feature is badly needed. Complex deals particuarly where government is involved requires incredibly strict probity responses. The current setup is far too limiting for a CRM...
I completley agree. We need a way to make certain accounts/companies private. I store information on the employees I am training and managing within HubSpots and need a way to make those "companies" private from employees outside of myself and the management team. This is crucial!
