Knowledge base
Share a board with a client by link
Make a copy-paste link, decide what it grants, and take it back if it goes to the wrong place. No email needed and no account needed to look.
The fastest way to show a client where their work is: open the board, choose Share a link, and paste what you get wherever you already talk to them.
We do not send anything. The link is yours — a chat message, a WhatsApp, an email you write in your own words, a line in a document. That is deliberate: a client is far more likely to open a link in the thread they are already reading than an email from a platform they have never heard of.
Does the person need a Zinn® account?
Not for a read-only link. They click it and the board opens. No signup, no sign-in, no password to forget.
They need an account only to write — to comment, answer a question you have asked, move a card or raise a request. That takes one screen, it is free, and the board is waiting on the other side rather than dumping them on a dashboard.
So the rule of thumb is simple. If you want them to look, use a read-only link. If you want them to take part, use a client link and expect them to sign in once.
What the four link types grant
- Read-only — sees the board, changes nothing, needs no account. This is the default and
- Client — can comment, answer your questions and raise a request in your intake column.
- Board member — works the board like one of your team. For a freelancer or a
- Board manager — full control of the board, including who else is on it.
it is what you want most of the time.
Needs a free account.
subcontractor, not for a client.
What a link can and cannot show
A link shows exactly what your client sees in their own console. Columns, cards and comments you left internal are excluded before the page is built, not hidden by the interface — so there is no setting anybody can get wrong and no way for a link to leak a note you wrote to your own team.
If you want a client to follow a stage, mark that column client-visible. If you want to keep an estimate, a blocker or an internal argument to yourself, leave the card internal and it does not exist as far as the link is concerned.
Expiry, use limits and revoking
Every link expires. You choose when, up to three months, and there is deliberately no never-expires option — a link with no end is a key sitting in a chat window long after the project finished.
You can also cap how many people may use it. Set it to single use and it stops working the moment somebody joins.
Revoking is different from expiring, and the difference matters. When a link simply ages out, anybody who already joined keeps the board — a colleague who joined in March must not lose access in April because the string you pasted has grown old. Revoking removes the link and everybody who joined through it, and tells you how many people that was. That is the button for "I pasted that in the wrong channel".
We can only show you the link once
We store a fingerprint of the link, not the link. That means nobody can read it back out of our database — including us — and it also means the moment you close the panel, that particular link is gone from view for good.
So copy it when it appears. If you lose one, make another and revoke the old one; it costs nothing.
Your branding, not ours
On a plan with white-label branding, the shared board carries your name, your logo and your colour. If a client does need to sign in, they are sent to your branded login, not to ours — so at no point does your client discover who hosts the board.
Still stuck?
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