Share a board privately

Private link

The default. The board does not appear in browse, in search on the site, or in the sitemap, and the page tells search engines not to index it. Anyone holding the link can open it without an account.

The page metadata for a non-public board is deliberately generic. Your board name does not appear in the title or the description, because those get read by anything that fetches the URL, including a link preview in a chat app.

Password link

Same as a private link, with a password on top. Use it when an unlisted URL is not enough: you are sending the link into a group chat, a ticket, or an email thread that gets forwarded. The password is the part that survives the link being passed on.

The upload form calls this option Password link and the dashboard calls it Private link + password. Same setting, two labels.

Public

Listed in browse and indexable, but only once a schematic or PCB preview has finished rendering. A board you just marked public will not appear in listings until it has something to show.

Before you make a board public, look at what is in the archive rather than what is on the page. Uploads are stored whole, so anything you zipped up goes with it: customer names in a silkscreen layer, an internal part number in a BOM field, a supplier quote in a notes file, an .env that ended up in the project folder. The rendered views will not necessarily show you any of that, and the Files tab will.

What a private link does not protect you from

A link is a credential that anyone can copy. It can be forwarded, pasted into a ticket, quoted in a screenshot, or left in a browser history on a shared machine. Nothing on our side can tell the difference between the person you sent it to and the next person they sent it to.

So the rule is simple: if the board would cause a problem in the wrong hands, add a password. If it would cause a serious problem, do not upload it. An unlisted URL is a convenience, not a control.

Changing your mind

You pick visibility when you upload. To change it afterwards, go to your dashboard and use the access control on the board's card. The project page itself shows the current setting as a label and does not edit it, so looking for the control there is a dead end.

Making a public board private removes it from listings, but anything already fetched while it was public is out of your hands, and a search engine may hold a cached copy for a while. Treat publishing as one-way for anything sensitive.

Sharing for review

A private link is usually the right way to get a design reviewed. The reviewer opens the schematic, PCB, 3D view and BOM in a browser, with no account and no CAD install, and does not need to download anything to give you an opinion.

One thing to do before you send it: run the checks yourself. A signed-out reviewer can read results that already exist but cannot start a run, so if you have never run them your reviewer finds an empty tab and no way to fill it.