Workspaces

A workspace is a completely separate knowledge base inside your account: its own records, people, families, timeline, places, conflicts, Research Companion conversations, insights, and Tree Health Score. Nothing crosses between workspaces - a duplicate match, a research finding, or a companion chat in one workspace never touches another.

This is for keeping unrelated research lines apart - your own family history, a client's family, or a one-off lookup - without them ever mixing.

How many workspaces you get

• Explorer, Researcher, and Archivist include 1 workspace.
• Professional includes up to 5 workspaces.

Every account starts with one workspace (your default workspace), created automatically. On Explorer, Researcher, and Archivist that is the only workspace you can have. On Professional you can create up to 4 more.

Plan limits are shared across your workspaces, not per workspace

Your monthly credits and your Research Companion usage budget belong to your account, not to any one workspace. If you have 3 workspaces on Professional, they all draw from the same monthly credit pool - having more workspaces buys you isolation between research lines, not extra allowance. See Plans & Billing for how credits and the Companion budget work.

Creating and managing workspaces

Manage your workspaces from Settings > Workspaces. Professional accounts use this page to create, rename, and switch their default; if you downgrade and still have more than one workspace, this page stays available too, so you can rename any of them or delete the ones you no longer need (a read-only workspace can't be made the default - see Deleting a workspace below):

• New workspace - create another isolated knowledge base, up to your plan's limit.
• Rename - change a workspace's name at any time, including a read-only one.
• Set as default - make a different workspace the one you land in and the one that can never be locked. Your default workspace cannot be archived.
• Delete - permanently erase a workspace you no longer need. See Deleting a workspace below.

Switching between workspaces

If you have more than one workspace, a switcher appears at the top of the sidebar (and in the menu on mobile) showing your current workspace's name. Open it and pick another workspace to switch.

Switching is a server-side setting on your account, not something stored in your browser: it takes effect immediately on every tab and every device you are signed into. If you were partway through an upload or a Companion conversation in another workspace, it stays there waiting for you when you switch back.

What happens if you downgrade from Professional

Nothing is ever deleted. If you drop from Professional to a plan that only includes 1 workspace:

• Your default workspace keeps working normally - full read and write access, no change.
• Every other workspace locks to read-only, indefinitely. You can still open it, browse everything in it, and export it in full. You just cannot upload new records, confirm new profiles, or make any other change to it until you either come back within your plan's limit or upgrade again.
• If you happened to be working inside a workspace that just became read-only, you are moved back to your default workspace automatically so you are not left staring at a locked screen.
• Deleting is a change too. Records, people and families inside a read-only workspace cannot be deleted individually, by you or by anything else - the ones you can see stay frozen exactly as you left them. One exception: anything already sitting in trash before the workspace locked is still automatically and permanently deleted 30 days after it was trashed, on the normal schedule, whether or not the workspace is currently read-only - locking a workspace does not pause that clock. (You can still delete the whole workspace at once; see Deleting a workspace below.)

What it looks like in a read-only workspace

Nothing is hidden or greyed out. You can open every page, search, read every record, and start an export exactly as before. When you try something that would change the workspace - adding a record, editing a person, merging a duplicate, asking the Research Companion - the action stops and explains that the workspace is read-only, with the option to upgrade. Nothing is half-saved: the change simply does not start.

The one thing you can still change is the workspace's name, so you can keep your workspaces straight while they are locked.

If the wrong workspace ends up read-only

Which workspace stays writable is decided by which one is marked as your default when the downgrade takes effect - not by the one you were last working in. So if your research lives in a workspace you never set as the default, that is the one that locks.

Nothing is lost either way: a read-only workspace stays fully readable and exportable. Before downgrading, the tidy fix is to open Settings > Workspaces and use Set as default on the workspace you actually work in.

If you only notice afterwards, email [email protected] and we will move the default for you. We can do this up to twice in any calendar month per account. It is there to fix a mistake rather than to rotate which workspace is writable - if you need more than one writable workspace at a time, that is what Professional is for.

Upgrading back to Professional unlocks every archived workspace again, exactly as it was left.

Your full account export (Settings > Import / Export) always covers every workspace you have, including read-only ones - downgrading never shrinks what you can take with you. See Importing & Exporting Data.

Deleting a workspace

If you no longer need a workspace, you can permanently delete it and everything in it. The control lives at Settings > Workspaces, next to the workspace you want to remove.

You can delete a read-only workspace. Its contents stay frozen while it's locked (see above), but the workspace itself isn't - you can still delete it yourself, the same as any other workspace.

Your default workspace cannot be deleted. If the workspace you want to remove is currently your default, use Set as default on a different workspace first, then come back and delete the one you no longer want. A read-only workspace can't be made the default, so if every other workspace is currently locked after a downgrade, you can't make this change yourself - see If the wrong workspace ends up read-only above for the support-assisted option. This is the only workspace deletion doesn't reach; there's also a small limit on how many deletion requests you can start per hour, to prevent abuse.

Deleting a workspace takes two steps, on purpose, since it cannot be undone:

1. Type the workspace's name exactly as it appears, to confirm you have the right one, then start the deletion.
2. Click the confirmation link we email you. For your security, the link only works if you also re-enter your password (or re-sign in with the identity provider you use, if you don't have a password) - and it expires after 30 minutes. If it expires, go back to Settings > Workspaces and start again.

What deletion does. The moment you confirm, everything in that workspace is erased immediately: its records, people, families, places, timeline, conflicts, Research Companion conversations, insights, Tree Health Score, and every file stored in it (record images, imported GEDCOM files, imported media, Research Companion attachments, profile photos, and any exports you generated from it). There is no undo, no trash, and no way to recover it afterward - treat the confirmation step as final.

What deletion does not touch. Your other workspaces are completely unaffected, and so is the rest of your account: billing, your profile, and your full account export (which always covers every workspace you still have) are untouched by deleting one workspace.

Related reading

• Plans & Billing - the four plans, pooled credits, and the Research Companion budget.
• Getting Started - the core upload-to-knowledge-base workflow, which happens inside whichever workspace is active.
• Importing & Exporting Data - exporting your data, across every workspace.
• Using KleioBase professionally - keeping client work in its own workspace.