Child Sites, Workspaces, Partners, and Admin Permissions: When To Choose Each

With the introduction of Child Sites, Workspaces, and Partners, Files.com now offers one of the most flexible and powerful organizational models in the file integration and managed file transfer space.

That flexibility is intentional — but it can also raise an important question:

When should I use child sites vs. workspaces vs. partners?

And how do these newer constructs relate to existing concepts like folder admins and group admins?

This article answers those questions clearly, practically, and honestly — including why certain features exist, what they are designed for, and how to combine them effectively without painting yourself into a corner.

Files.com Is Flexible By Design

Before diving into recommendations, it’s important to set the right expectation.

Files.com is deliberately designed to be flexible, not prescriptive. While this article outlines best-practice guidance, you are not required to follow it rigidly. If a different structure better matches your operational reality, that’s perfectly valid.

That said, we strongly encourage customers to think through these decisions intentionally, and — when in doubt — to review them with your onboarding or account team. A small amount of upfront design can save a significant amount of operational friction later.

Feature Names Are Intentional

One of the guiding philosophies at Files.com is that feature names reflect intended use.

This matters more than it may seem.

For example, we’ve had customers ask whether the Partners feature is a good way to organize internal departments. While it might work in a purely technical sense, that is not what our Partners feature is designed for — and the name tells you that.

Partners is explicitly optimized for external third-party counterparties: customers, vendors, suppliers, and trading partners. That feature will continue to evolve in ways that benefit external relationships, not internal organizational models. As a result, we are unlikely to add enhancements to Partners that are meant to support internal user management.

By contrast:

• Workspaces are intentionally named to be neutral and flexible
• Child Sites are also designed to support a wide range of organizational patterns
• Folder Admins are exactly what they sound like — administrators of a folder — and are unlikely to evolve beyond that scope

Understanding this naming philosophy will help you make decisions that age well as the platform evolves.

The Fixed Organizational Hierarchy

All of these features operate within a strict, permanent hierarchy. This hierarchy will not be reversed or reshaped in the future, so it’s essential to understand it clearly:

Sites (Main Site + Child Sites) → Workspaces (Within a Site) → Partners (Within a Site or Workspace) → Users (Within a Site or Workspace or Partner)

Some key implications of this hierarchy:

• A workspace can never span multiple sites
• A partner can never belong to more than one workspace
• Users (other than site admins) are scoped to a single workspace

This structure is fixed and foundational. Nearly every design decision should start by acknowledging this hierarchy.

Child Sites

Child Sites sit at the highest level of organizational separation and are the right choice whenever you need hard boundaries between environments.

You should consider child sites when you need:

Different Primary Infrastructure Or Identity

• Different geographic regions
• Different custom domains
• Different branding (logos, colors, login pages, emails)

Each site has its own IP addresses and custom domain configuration. These cannot be shared or merged across sites.

Different Site-Wide Security Or Compliance Settings

• Encryption required vs. optional
• HIPAA / BAA vs. non-PHI environments
• Site-wide policy differences that must be enforced universally

Environment Separation (Prod / Staging / Dev)

Many customers use child sites to separate:

• Production
• Staging
• Development
• UAT / NPE / Test environments

This is especially common for two reasons:

1. Network Controls Separate IP addresses make it easier to enforce firewall rules, traffic isolation, and logging guarantees.
2. Visual Safety Customers often apply dramatically different branding, banners, or warnings to non-production environments to prevent costly mistakes.

While it is possible to model environments using workspaces or folders, child sites are generally the cleanest and safest approach when those distinctions matter.

Cost Considerations

Child site require an Enterprise plan and are metered and billed. For most customers already on an Enterprise plan, we are able to include enough Child Sites to meet your needs for little to no additional cost.

Workspaces

Workspaces are the primary organizational tool inside a Site and are designed for delegated administration at scale.

All workspaces within a Site share all of the sitewide settings, including the same IP addresses, domain names, and branding.

However, each workspace is otherwise a self-contained operational universe.

Each workspace has its own:

• Users, Groups, and Partners
• Files, Folders, and Folder Settings
• Remote Servers, Syncs, Mounts, Automations, and AS2

Default Workspace Behavior

Before workspaces are enabled on a Site, everything lives in the default workspace (Workspace ID 0). Once new Workspaces are enabled, new resources can be created in the new workspaces.

Ideal Use Cases For Workspaces

• Internal departments
• Business units
• Client engagements
• Large-scale multi-tenant internal operations

The Most Important Constraint

Only site administrators can operate across workspaces within a Site.

All other users are locked to a single workspace and cannot see or manage resources outside of it.

For most of our customers using Workspaces — especially mid-market and enterprise — this is a feature, not a limitation. It allows:

• Clean separation of responsibility
• Safe delegated administration
• Scalable automation via API
• Clear operational ownership

Cost Considerations

Workspaces are unmetered and unlimited, and can be created and destroyed freely via the web app, API, and SDKs like Terraform. This makes them ideal for dynamic, high-volume organizational models.

Partners

Our Partners feature adds one more layer of delegation, specifically designed for external business relationships.

A Partner represents a third party that trades with your business, such as:

• A customer
• A vendor
• A supplier
• A trading partner

Why Our Partners Feature Exists

Partner onboarding and management is consistently cited as one of the biggest pain points in traditional MFT systems:

• Onboarding takes too long
• Supporting partners is manual and error-prone
• Self-service is limited or nonexistent

Partners were built to solve all three problems.

Our Partners Feature Enables

• A single, scoped permission model per partner
• Partner-managed user creation and password resets
• Partner-managed encryption key uploads
• Clean user jailing and route scoping
• Faster onboarding with less internal effort

Unique Capabilities Exclusive To Partners

Partners unlock functionality that does not apply to Workspaces:

• Site-to-Site Partner Linking If your partner also uses Files.com, they can link their own Site directly for single sign on between their own Site and their access to your Site. This doesn’t grant additional access — but dramatically improves their operational visibility and management.

• Automated Partner Onboarding (Coming Soon) Files.com is introducing automated onboarding workflows for Partners, including:

  • Automated acceptance tests
  • Send/receive validation
  • Self-service partner verification

  These capabilities live inside the Partners feature, not workspaces, because they are explicitly designed for external counterparties.

Cost Considerations

Partners can be created and destroyed freely via the web app, API, and SDKs like Terraform. This makes them ideal for dynamic, high-volume customers. We will soon be capping the number of Partners that can be added on our Starter and Power plans, and we do intend to create a billing apparatus around them similar to Users.

How Folder Admins And Group Admins Fit In

Folder Admins and Group Admins are tactical permission tools, not organizational layers.

• Folder Admins manage folders — and that’s all they are designed to do. These are useful within Workspaces or Child Sites.
• Group Admins are a legacy capability largely replaced by Workspaces for most customers.

Conclusion

Files.com now offers a deeply powerful organizational toolkit:

• Child Sites for hard separation, compliance, branding, and environments
• Workspaces for scalable internal delegation and operations
• Partners for frictionless external collaboration
• Folder Admins for precise tactical control

Three years ago, none of this existed. Today, these capabilities allow customers to rethink — and dramatically improve — how they operate.

With recent additions like Child Site Management Policies, and continued investment in Workspaces and Partners, we expect many customers to meaningfully restructure their deployments to take advantage of these capabilities.

And in doing so, unlock faster onboarding, clearer ownership, and far more scalable file operations.