Manage the Guest User Account
YouTrack lets you use a guest account to enable access for anonymous users.
The guest user account is banned by default in all YouTrack Cloud instances.
Even when enabled, the guest account isn't assigned any default roles. If you want to allow anonymous access to issues in YouTrack, you need to explicitly grant access rights to the guest account.
To access YouTrack issues in read-only mode, the guest account can be granted the following permissions:
Read Project Basic
Read Issue
Read Issue Comment
With these permissions, guests can view issues and comments that do not have any visibility restrictions. It does not grant permission to edit issue attributes, post comments, or edit comments.
In earlier YouTrack versions, this level of access was defined by the default Issue Reader role. If you're working with YouTrack versions 2026.1 or later, you need to create a custom role that includes these permissions. To learn how to create a new role in YouTrack, see Create and Edit Roles.
Enable Access for Guest Users
If you want to let users access issues in YouTrack without registering their own accounts, you can activate the guest account.
If you want to allow anonymous access to specific projects on your YouTrack site, you can grant roles to the guest user in one or more projects.
To allow read-only access to issues in all projects, you can grant the role that defines this access profile to the guest user in the Global project.
To enable access for the guest account:
From the main navigation menu, select
.Select the guest account in the Users list.
If the guest account is currently banned, click the Unban button.
To add permissions, you can either add the guest account to another group so it will inherit its roles, or you can grant roles directly to the account without adding it to a group.
For more information, see Manage User Access.