Sign up for Azure Boards

Azure DevOps Services

Sign up for Azure Boards to plan, track, and discuss work across your teams. For a short overview, see What is Azure Boards?.

This quickstart shows the simplest path to get started and invite teammates.

What you'll learn:

• How to create an organization and project.
• How to sign up with a Microsoft or GitHub identity.
• How to invite team members to your project.

Quick steps:

1. Sign up with a Microsoft or GitHub account.
2. Create a project (public or private).
3. Invite teammates and set their access levels.

To sign up for all Azure DevOps Services, see Sign up, sign in to Azure DevOps.

Prerequisites

Sign up

You can sign up using either a Microsoft account (personal or Microsoft Entra) or a GitHub account. Choose the option that matches how you plan to authenticate and invite users.

Sign up with a personal Microsoft account

1. If you don't have one, create a Microsoft account.

2. Go to Azure DevOps and select Get started with Azure.

3. Select either Try Azure for free or Pay as you go.

4. Enter your Microsoft account credentials and go through the sign-up process.

   Azure DevOps creates an organization:

   • If you signed up with a newly created Microsoft account, Azure DevOps creates a project named after your account.
   • If you signed up with an existing Microsoft account, create a project next.

   Sign in to your organization at any time: https://dev.azure.com/{Your_Organization}.

Sign up with a GitHub account

1. If you don't have one, create a GitHub account.

2. Go to Azure DevOps and select Get started with Azure.

3. Select Sign in with GitHub.

4. Enter your account credentials and go through the sign-up process. You're asked to Authorize Microsoft-corp.

   Azure DevOps creates an organization. Sign in to your organization at any time https://dev.azure.com/{Your_Organization}. Azure DevOps turns on the External guest access policy by default.

   

An organization gets created based on the account you used to sign in. Sign in to your organization at any time, (https://dev.azure.com/{Your_Organization}).

You can rename and delete your organization, or change the organization ___location. For more information, see Manage organizations.

Enable GitHub invitations

Creating a new Azure DevOps organization with your GitHub username turns on the External guest access policy by default. For existing organizations, your administrator can turn on this capability via Organization settings > Policies tab.

Once the setting gets changed, sign out of Azure DevOps, and then from a fresh browser session, sign back in to the organization dev.azure.com/{Organization_Name} or organizationName.visualstudio.com with your GitHub credentials. You're recognized as a GitHub user and the GitHub invitation experience is available to you.

For more information about GitHub authentication, see Connect to GitHub/FAQs.

Enable AI assistance for Azure DevOps

For enhanced productivity across your Azure DevOps workflow, use the Azure DevOps MCP Server to enable AI assistance with your project data. Get intelligent insights for daily standups, sprint planning, code reviews, project reporting, pull request analysis, and work item management—all through natural language queries to your AI assistant. For more information and installation instructions, see the Azure DevOps MCP Server overview.

Create a project

After you sign in, you'll be prompted to create a project. Projects can be public or private and are the containers where your teams do work.

1. Enter a project name and optional description.
2. Choose Visibility: Public (open-source) or Private (restricted access).
3. (Optional) Expand Advanced to choose version control (Git or TFVC) and the work item process (Basic, Agile, Scrum, or CMMI).
4. Select Create project — your project's board appears automatically.

For more on project options, see Create a project using advanced settings and What is a public project?.

Invite teammates

Add people to your organization and project so they can view and contribute to work.

1. From the web portal, open Organization settings (click the Azure DevOps logo and the gear icon).
2. Select Users > Add new users.
3. Enter email addresses (Microsoft accounts) or GitHub IDs, choose an Access level (Basic or Stakeholder), and add users to your project and groups (Readers, Contributors, or Administrators).
4. Select Add to send invitations.

Notes:

• Basic access grants full Boards features (a limited number of free Basic licenses might be available). Stakeholder access provides limited access for viewing and light editing of work items.
• If you use Microsoft Entra to manage your organization, invite users by their Microsoft Entra accounts or follow your organization's provisioning process.
• For detailed steps, see Add users or groups to a team or project and Add organization users for Azure DevOps Services.

Advanced project options

If you need a different process or repository type than the defaults, create a new project and expand Advanced to choose options for Version control and Work item process. After creating the new project, you can delete the original one if desired.

For step-by-step guidance, see Choose a process for a comparison of processes.

Next step

Related content

• Track issues and tasks
• About access levels
• Define organizations and projects