Roles & permissions

Roles & permissions

Activator 3 uses a single, unified Designer interface. What you can see and do depends on your role. Roles are implemented via feature flags, and can be customized per tenant.

How the permission model works

Activator 3 evaluates access in two steps:

1. Role-based capabilities (feature flags): control which tools, panels, buttons, and workflows are available in the UI.

2. Resource-level permissions: some objects also enforce rules such as membership, ownership, or tenant policy when you perform an action.

Roles

Activator 3 supports three end-user roles:

Activator Content Editor

• Primary focus: produce and edit content using approved building blocks.

• Has a simplified authoring experience (some advanced panels and workflows are disabled by default).

Activator Content Designer

• Primary focus: create and maintain content structures and reusable assets.

• Has access to broader creation workflows compared to Content Editor.

Activator Brand Designer

• Primary focus: brand governance and advanced authoring capabilities.

• Owns brand-level Design System creation and advanced Design System editing.

Default role setup (feature flags)

The table below summarizes the default capabilities configured for each role. Tenants can override these flags.

What the main differences mean in practice

Content Editor vs Content Designer

• Content Editor has key advanced authoring tools disabled by default (Styles Panel, Components Panel, Source Code editing, and Layout workflows).

• Content Designer has Briefcase functionality enabled and keeps the broader authoring workflows available.

Brand Designer

• Brand Designer includes everything in Content Designer, plus governance-related capabilities (primarily around Design Systems).

Design Systems

Design System access is a combination of (A) Design System feature flags and (B) Design System-specific resource permissions. This section documents both.

Design System capabilities (feature flags)

These capabilities control what Design System features are available in the UI. They are role-based and can be customized per tenant.

Design System permissions

In addition to role capabilities, Design Systems may enforce object-level rules when you perform actions. Common patterns include:

• RESTRICTED* Membership / editors list: you may need to be added as an editor on a specific Design System (or its resources) to create or update it.

• RESTRICTED** Ownership rules: some Design System resources can be edited or deleted only by their creator unless elevated permissions apply.