How many Super Admins should I have in our HubSpot Portal?

Less is more when it comes to Super Administrators or, more concisely, fewer Super Admins is less risky. Super Admins have the power to see everything and do anything in your HubSpot Portal. You should limit the number of Super Admins to protect privacy, increase security and reduce risk.

HubSpot has a dizzying array of settings to control your team's access to HubSpot’s features, settings and contact information. Often, when we run a HubSpot Audit, we learn Super Admins have granted team members Super Admin access rather than taking time to set the appropriate permissions (and no more than necessary permissions).

Why it’s important to limit the number of Super Admins

A Super Admin should be a person trusted by you and the people in your organisation. Here’s why it’s important to trust your Super Admins, and limit the number of Super Admins.

Privacy

Super Admins have full access to all HubSpot Users, Tools and everything in the CRM (Contacts, financial information, etc.). Super Admins can export all of your customer data which, if shared inappropriately, would constitute a data breach. Legally, depending on where you operate, you are required to notify all of your contacts about a data breach.

Security

Super Admins have the power to add or remove HubSpot Users, change HubSpot plans, and export anything they want from HubSpot. If a Super Admin’s account is ever accessed by a hacker then they can control the entire HubSpot Portal, remove legitimate Users and access all of your customer and financial data.

Financial

Commerce Hub allows Super Admins to set up bank accounts, in HubSpot, to receive funds from your transactions. To reduce the financial risk you want to minimise the number of Users who have the ability to transfer money to bank accounts. HubSpot is increasingly connected to your organisation’s financial records, so the need for excellent data hygiene is more important than ever.

Legal 

You’ll want to limit the ability of your team to accidentally change something that affects your legal compliance e.g. GDPR (General Data Protection Rules) settings, email compliance, data privacy, etc.. 

Setup 

You’ve invested significant time, effort and budget to set up your HubSpot portal to run efficiently. Super Admins can change anything in your HubSpot portal including Pipelines, Workflows, Forms, Emails, Subscription Types and more. The fewer people making changes in HubSpot the better. Having a structured change management process means less data churn, fewer mistakes and fewer duplicates.

Custom Properties

When team members can add properties, whenever they feel like it, you typically end up with a mess. Quickly you end up with duplicate properties, unused properties, poorly named properties, and typically the new properties are only used for a short time. When you have too many Custom Properties it makes it difficult for the team to know which properties to use. The result is a cluttered HubSpot Portal that slows your team down and increases mistakes.

Super Admin is not [just] a Status Symbol

While your Super Admins have superpowers beware of anyone in the organisation that wants to be a Super Admin to make themselves feel more important. Often these people don’t understand the implications listed and typically should not be trusted with Super Admin rights.

Here’s why you should have at least two Super Admins

If you only have one Super Admin in your account then you could run into issues if that person is unavailable, locks themselves out, or leaves your organisation.

• Super Admins can add or remove Users in HubSpot and grant them permissions to access tools, features and data. If you only have one Super Admin and they cannot access HubSpot, several settings in your HubSpot Portal cannot be changed e.g. billing information, feature access, User permissions.
• Unlocking User access when one of your Users locks themselves out. Super Admins can reset 2FA to allow your team back into the HubSpot Portal.
• If one Super Admin goes rogue (yes, we’ve seen it happen) then you need another Super Admin to remove their privileges as soon as possible.

What is a HubSpot Partner Admin?

In 2023 HubSpot introduced a new User Type called Partner Admin. The Partner Admin can be assigned access to all the tools and features necessary for your partner to work in your account but restricts access to some of the features that a partner should not change.

A HubSpot Partner Admin can not:

• Add and remove other super admins
• Access account billing and financial transactions

How to check the number of Super Admins you have

If you are a Super Admin, or have permissions to view Users in your HubSpot Account, you can check the number of Super Admins in your HubSpot Portal.

Settings (cog icon, top right) > Users & Teams (left menu) > Users (first tab)

By default you will see all the Users in your HubSpot Portal. There’s a column in the Users Table that shows Access (if you can’t see it you may need to edit the columns).

If you have lots of Users you can add an Advanced Filter "by Access" to show only Super Users.

https://knowledge.hubspot.com/user-management/hubspot-user-permissions-guide#super-admin

How many Super Admins should we have?

Well, that depends on your organisation, structure and team size. Here’s a few considerations:

• Smaller teams – growing organisations often share HubSpot Management responsibilities and its typical to see more Super Admins per User.
• HubSpot Hubs – you may have a different Super Admin for each Hub e.g. a Customer Success Super Admin for Service Hub, Marketing Manager for Marketing Hub, etc.
• Business Units – does your organisation use HubSpot’s Enterprise feature of Business Units? You will probably need at least one Super Admin per Business Unit in addition to the Super Admins that manage the HubSpot Portal.

• Multiple Countries - if your teams operate in multiple countries you may want to have a Super Admin for each country and/or timezone.
• Multiple Languages - you may have different teams, in different regions, speaking different languages. It’s much easier to administer HubSpot when you’re speaking the same language.
• Multiple branches - even if your team is in the same country, timezone and all speak the same language you may need to have a Super Admin in each branch.
• Franchises – typically a Franchisee doesn’t have full Super Admin Access but they may have access to add or remove Users.

Here’s a handy table to give you an estimate based on the number of HubSpot Users you have in HubSpot. As mentioned this is a guide – not a rule and you need to decide based on your organisation's needs.

*The maximum number of HubSpot Users in an account is 2,500

Warning

With the new HubSpot’s Seat Based Pricing you may want to increase restrictions to stop your team adding new Users so your costs don’t increase unnecessarily.

Is there a limit to the amount of Super Admins?

HubSpot has a limit of 2,500 users per account and you could make everyone a Super User… but hopefully, by now, you realise that would be a bad idea!

Conclusion – fewer Super Admins is safer

We recommend you minimise the number of Super Admins in your HubSpot Portal, because when you grant a user Super Admin access they are automatically given access to every setting, all the features and complete access to all data. 

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the LinkedIn Post that inspired me to write this blog post.