Inviting people one at a time, or in bulk
The Users screen adds one person per dialog, with no multi-email box. What that means for forty people, and when the CSV import is genuinely the faster path.
You have a spreadsheet of forty names and the Invite dialog on the Users screen has one field for an email address, one for a first name, one for a last name and one for a role — no comma-separated list, no paste-a-column box, no second column for a role per person. That is not a screen you missed; the dialog genuinely handles one person per submission, and there is no multi-person variant of it today.
The real choice is not speed, it is which one actually finishes the job
| Path | Effort for 40 people | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Invite dialog, one at a time | 40 dialogs, 40 role pickers | 40 accounts, each with a one-time link shown to you once. Where email delivery is configured, each person is emailed their link automatically; where it is not, you have 40 links to pass on yourself. |
CSV/JSON import, invited: false | One file, one upload | 40 active, immediately usable accounts with passwords you chose — you distribute the passwords yourself, once. |
CSV/JSON import, invited: true | One file, one upload | 40 accounts in a staged, not-yet-usable state, with no link shown or sent — this path has no invitation delivery of its own. |
In practice, for anything past two or three people, a non-invited bulk import is the fastest of the three: you decide each password and hand it over once, rather than shepherding forty separate links through a 7-day expiry. If email delivery is configured on your deployment, the Invite dialog is a reasonable second — the sending is automatic, it is only the forty dialogs that cost you. See Bulk importing users for the exact file format, the fixed role every row receives, and the fields the import cannot set.
When the dialog is still the right choice
- You are adding one or two people and do not want to prepare a file for it.
- You want each person on a different role, and you would rather pick the role by hand than get the role name exactly right per row in a file — bulk import gives every row the same fixed role, member, with no per-row override.
- Your organisation uses single sign-on and you provision people through your identity provider instead of either console path — see Single sign-on with SAML.
What to do next
- For more than a handful of people, read Bulk importing users and prepare a
invited: falsefile with a password per row. - For one or two people, use the Invite dialog, and read What an invited user actually receives first so you know to keep the link when it is shown to you.
- Once everyone has an account, read Groups and automatic membership to sort them by rule instead of by hand.