Softr Intranet Guide: Team Users, Permissions and Plan Gates

Yes, Softr can run a company intranet, with free Company Intranet, Team Wiki and Employee Directory templates. The plan depends on one counting rule. Employees whose email shares a business domain with a builder are Team users, and every plan includes a set number per workspace: Free allows 5 app users in total, Basic 5 Team users with no way to add more, Pro includes 10 and Business 30 ^[1]. For most companies past a handful of staff, Pro with 50 AI credits a month at $119 per month billed monthly or $99 per month billed annually, per workspace, is the realistic floor, because custom user groups, Google sign-in and comments start there. Business adds the installable app, two-factor sign-in and global search. SSO is Enterprise only.

Pick a starting point before you build anything

The Company Intranet template arrives with role-based groups for admins, managers and employees, document management restricted by team, events with RSVP, an employee directory, discussions and recognition shoutouts ^[2]. Those role groups are custom user groups, so they need Pro or higher. Team Wiki is the lighter option, an internal hub for policies, playbooks, SOPs, onboarding resources and company news. Using a template is free and sign-up asks for no card. It copies the interface plus a Softr Database with sample data, though a few templates still run on Airtable or Google Sheets. A template cannot be applied to an app you already started. Our Softr templates guide covers the wider library.

A prompt is the other route. Describe your intranet and the AI Co-Builder, launched in March 2026, generates the tables, pages, navigation, user groups with permissions and a theme, sometimes after two or three clarifying questions. It assembles Softr's own blocks rather than generating an app codebase you could export, and Softr offers no code export or self-hosting. Softr's tutorial models an intranet with three tables (users, departments, announcements) and two groups keyed to a Role field. For parts no block covers, such as an org chart, the Co-Builder produces a Vibe Coding component. Prompting spends AI credits; editing by hand does not.

Data comes next. Softr recommends its own Softr Databases for new apps, and the pricing page's record limits apply to them: 5,000 records per workspace on Free, 50,000 on Basic, 500K on Pro and 1M on Business. If HR already keeps staff records in a spreadsheet, Google Sheets connects on every plan with real-time two-way sync, and Airtable and Notion do too, each under its own limits. When the users table is synced, each new row becomes an app user with no separate invitation, so onboarding a hire starts in the staff list.

Team users, Client users and what headcount costs

The split decides your bill. A Team user shares a business email domain with any builder in the workspace, while Gmail, Outlook and every other free domain always count as Client users ^[3]. Staff on the company domain fill the Team allowance, and a freelancer signing in with Gmail lands in the Client pool. The two pools never merge, so empty Client places on Pro do nothing for your eleventh employee. Softr counts unique emails across all published apps, so one person using two of your apps counts once. Builders and deactivated users do not count at all.

Growing past the included Team users works only on Pro and Business. Basic stops at five. On Pro each extra Team user costs $3 per user per month, on Business $5 per user per month, and both are billed monthly even when the plan itself is billed annually. Softr checks counts daily, emails the owner and bills extra users after a 7-day grace period. Each plan caps extra users at a limit, beyond which new accounts are created but stay deactivated. If payment for extra users keeps failing, everyone beyond the allowance is deactivated.

On Pro, each extra Team user is billed at $3 per user per month, up to a limit Softr sets; the step from Pro to Business is +$276 per month billed monthly or +$230 per month billed annually by our arithmetic. Weigh the two against your real headcount, and move to Business for its features, such as the installable app and two-factor sign-in, rather than for headcount alone, unless you reach the limit Softr sets on extra users for Pro. The full fee structure, including extra builders and refunds, sits in our Softr pricing breakdown.

Keeping pages for staff, departments and roles

Every plan has two built-in groups, Visitors and Logged-in users. Custom groups start on Pro with three and rise to ten on Business. Softr's help center shows the standard intranet pattern: a user group defined by email domain, so a page is visible only to company users ^[4]. Because that is a custom group, it needs Pro. Dynamic groups are condition-based, so changing someone's department in the data updates what they see. Visibility of pages, blocks and action buttons, plus record filters by email or domain, is checked on Softr's server. Group edits apply after you publish.

Global data restrictions, which apply record-level rules across a whole table, arrive on Business. Softr's tutorial says a basic intranet can skip them, but an HR space where each employee should see only their own requests is where they earn their place. Softr itself warns that Airtable views and Google Sheets filters are not security measures, so rely on groups and conditional filters instead.

Sign-up needs a deliberate choice. An app can have sign-up disabled, open, invite-only or restricted to your email domains, and the domain-restricted option is Business. On Pro you can disable public sign-up and add staff by CSV import, user sync or invitation. Do not confuse this with form domain restrictions, a separate Pro feature that controls who can submit a form.

Sign-in, SSO and two-factor

Email and password works on every plan. Pro adds one-time email codes and Google sign-in for app users, which suits a company on Google Workspace. Business adds authenticator-app two-factor authentication for app users, available since August 2026, and session or inactivity settings beyond the defaults. SAML and OpenID SSO belong to Enterprise, where each app connects to one identity provider such as Azure, Okta or OneLogin, alongside other login methods and combinable with domain-based signup. SSO stays on Enterprise.

Magic links deserve care in a company setting. Softr describes them as permanent pre-authenticated links, so anyone holding one can sign in as that employee. Softr says it holds a SOC 2 Type II report, with report access on Enterprise, and says customer data is hosted in the EU, in Germany, by default. Builders' own accounts get multi-factor protection only through Studio SSO on Enterprise.

Directory, knowledge base and the daily feed

All building blocks are available on every plan, including Lists, Table, Charts, Form, Map and Calendar, and Softr's docs suggest the Grid block for searchable, filterable employee directories. The social layer is gated. Comments and mentions are a Pro app-user action, and the in-app notification inbox launched in October 2026 needs Pro per the docs. Push notifications are Business, and on iPhones employees must install the app as a PWA to receive them. Global search is Business, which matters once a wiki holds more pages than a menu can show.

Ask AI turns the knowledge base into a chat assistant that answers only from data the signed-in employee can already see. Every query spends AI credits from one monthly pool: 5 on Free, 10 on Basic, 50 on Pro and 100 on Business. Plan credits reset monthly with no rollover, add-on credits roll over for one month (pricing details), and at zero the AI pauses with no overage while the editor keeps working. Add-ons start at +$10 per month for 100 credits on every plan. Size them in a pilot.

Workflows handle the routine, and Softr's intranet guides show policy updates posted to Slack and weekly digests sent automatically. Pro allows 10,000 workflow actions a month and Business 25,000; at the limit workflows pause until it renews, and each action inside a loop counts once per item. For staff in the field, the installable app is a PWA on Business or higher, with no App Store or Google Play version and no offline use, as our Softr review explains.

What Celonis, ASU and DCW built

Softr says Celonis built a go-to-market knowledge base on Airtable with Softr for more than 1,500 GTM team members, with a first version in under five days. Celonis used the Vibe Coding Block next to standard blocks and kept permissions to a single user group. It reports maximum adoption within two to three months and calls the knowledge base one of its top three core tools. That audience sits far above what Pro and Business include plus their extra-user limits, so a team that size should expect to talk to Softr about Enterprise.

At Arizona State University, the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College launched a curriculum hub intranet on Softr and Airtable in under two months, according to the customer story. It reached more than 1,200 unique users, with 195 accounts created in the first month. The deciding factor was role-based permissions beyond what Airtable offered on its own, such as letting each person update only their own program.

DCW Cost Management sits at the other end. The small consultancy runs an employee portal for nine app users across three offices, where staff submit receipts for reimbursement and check their projects, and it was built without prior development experience. A headcount like that fits inside Pro's included Team users, so a firm of that size can start with groups and Google sign-in and never meet the extra-user charge.

The bottom line

Softr suits a company that wants an intranet on data it already keeps, built from a template or a prompt and shaped by user groups rather than code. The Team user count is the number to settle first. Pro covers most small companies with custom groups, Google sign-in and comments, and extra Team users can be added up to a limit. Business is worth it when you need the installable app, push alerts, two-factor sign-in, global search or domain-restricted sign-up. Teams that require SSO, SCIM or audit logs should start with Enterprise.