Sharing & collaboration
Live collaboration & presence
When two or more people open the same design, their edits sync in real time. No refreshing, no emailing files back and forth, no "wait, who has the latest version?" — everyone sees the same canvas as it changes.
Getting into a live session
There's nothing to switch on. A live session simply happens whenever more than one person is in the same design at once. People get in two ways:
- An edit invite sent to their email → see Inviting people by email.
- An editable link (Anyone with the link · Can edit) → see Share by link.
Two prerequisites make it work: the design has to be cloud-saved, and each person who is editing needs to be signed in so their changes are attributed to them. Once you're all in, changes merge automatically as each person works.
Note: an open editable link gives a stranger their own copy rather than a seat in your live room. For true per-person co-editing on the same file, invite people by email.
Live cursors and selections
As soon as someone else is editing, you'll see them on the canvas. Each editor gets a colored cursor that moves as they move, and whatever they've selected is highlighted in that same color. So you can watch a teammate drag a logo into place or reword a headline while you work somewhere else on the page.
Colors are assigned per person and stay consistent for everyone in the room — if Maya is teal on your screen, she's teal on everyone's. That makes it easy to glance at a cursor and know exactly who's doing what.
The avatar stack
Up in the top bar, everyone currently in the design appears as a stacked avatar. This is your at-a-glance "who's here" — the full guest list for the room, whether they arrived by invite or by link.
View-only visitors show up in the stack too, but they don't broadcast a cursor, because they aren't editing anything. So an avatar with no cursor on the canvas is simply someone looking, not touching. (For what those visitors can and can't do, see Viewer mode.)
Reading the connection status
A status indicator tells you the health of your live connection at any moment:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Live | You're connected and fully in sync with everyone else. |
| Connecting… | The session is being established — just getting set up. |
| Syncing… | You're catching up on recent changes before you're fully current. |
| Offline | The connection dropped. Your edits are held locally until it comes back. |
Most of the time you'll sit on Live. A brief flash of Connecting… or Syncing… is normal — for instance, right after you open the design or come back from a weak network.
How edits merge
You don't have to take turns. Edits to different objects merge cleanly, so two people can work on opposite corners of the same canvas without stepping on each other.
Undo stays personal, too: pressing Cmd/Ctrl+Z reverts your last change, not a teammate's. You'll never accidentally roll back someone else's work by hitting undo a few times.
Known quirk: if someone parks the tab in the background for a while, their avatar may briefly drop off other people's stacks and reappear when they come back. Their session is still alive — it's just a momentary presence blip, not a disconnect.
A note for admins
On a team account, an administrator can turn real-time editing off account-wide from the workspace's global settings. If live sessions aren't starting for anyone in your organization, that switch is the first thing to check — otherwise it's on by default.
Where to go next
Set up who's in the room with Inviting people by email, or learn how team seats and switching work in Workspaces & switching.