Sharing Your Portal

Portal URL

Every portal gets a unique, shareable URL. The format is:

https://www.collabportals.com/your-portal-slug

The slug is auto-generated from your portal name with a short unique suffix (e.g., client-tracker-x7k2m9). You can find your portal URL on the portal settings page.

Sharing the Link

Share your portal URL with end users however you prefer: email, Slack, embed it on your website, or include it in onboarding materials.

There's no limit on how many people can use the link. Access is controlled by whether the person's email exists in your user table, not by the URL itself.

How End Users Log In

Portal users don't need a CollabPortals account or an Airtable account. They authenticate with a simple email verification flow:

1. 1

   Visit the portal URL

   The user opens the portal link and sees a login screen with an email input.

2. 2

   Enter their email

   The user enters their email address. This must match an email in the portal's user table.

3. 3

   Receive a verification code

   CollabPortals sends a 6-digit verification code to their email address.

4. 4

   Enter the code

   The user enters the verification code and gains access to the portal.

What Happens After Login

Once authenticated, the user sees the portal's tables and data based on the permissions you've configured:

• Only tables with view permissions enabled are visible
• Records are automatically filtered to show only those linked to the user
• Field visibility is controlled by your field permission settings
• Create, edit, and delete buttons appear based on table permissions

Common Scenarios

Sharing with Clients

Send the portal link directly to clients via email. Each client sees only their own records because records are linked to their entry in the user table.

Embedding in Your Workflow

Include the portal link in automated emails, project kickoff documents, or your own app. The link stays the same even as you update portal permissions.

Embedding the Portal in a Page You Run

A portal can also be embedded in an iframe on a site of your own, so it appears inside your existing members area or client dashboard rather than as a separate destination. See the embedding feature page for what it does.

In the portal's settings, Allow this portal to be embedded takes the sites you will embed into, one per line, each starting with https://. Leaving it empty keeps iframe support off, which is the default.

Two behaviors to know before you use it:

• The login session is issued per embedding site. Signing in inside the iframe is a separate session from signing in on the portal directly, so signing in on one does not sign the user in on the other.
• The sites you list may call that portal's API directly, so list only sites you control. The list is not what stops other people from framing your portal, since any site can put a public URL in an iframe. It decides which sites the portal will accept direct API calls from.

Team Access

For internal teams, share the link in Slack or your intranet. Use role-based access to give different team members different permission levels.

Prerequisites for End Users

Before sharing your portal, make sure:

1. Users exist in the user table - Each person's email needs to be in the user table you selected when creating the portal, unless you have turned on self-registration and want people to add themselves
2. Records are linked - Data in other tables should be linked to user records so users see their own data
3. Permissions are configured - Set up table and field permissions so users see the right data

Next Steps

• Portal User Authentication - Technical details on the login flow
• Custom Domains - Serve the portal on your own domain instead of a collabportals.com URL
• Table Permissions - Control what users can see and do
• Role-Based Access Control - Set up different permission levels