- 📽️ Video explainer: Rooms
- Butter Rooms 101
- What types of rooms should you create?
- Room roles
- Rooms and workspaces
- Inviting participants
- Start a session
- Creating a room
- Accessing your rooms
- Setting up a room: Planning your sessions
- 1. Overview
- 2. Settings
- Set the room name and URL
- Write a room description
- Set the room to public or private
- Turn on automatic recording
- 3. Waiting room
- 4. People
- 5. Agenda
- 6. Toolbox
- 7. Recaps
- Start a session
- Butter Rooms FAQ
- Do I need to invite participants from the room setup for them to be able to join a session?
- Do room collaborators have to be members of my workspace?
- Do room collaborators count towards my workspace Basic member limit?
- Can guest room collaborators access my workspace library?
- Who can see my public rooms?
📽️ Video explainer: Rooms
Here’s a quick video tour of the room setup (which used to be known as the Session Planner).
Note: This video shows an older version of Butter. But it still gets most of the juicy details right.
Butter Rooms 101
A Butter room isn’t just a meeting link. It’s so much more!
- You plan sessions in a room. Your room is home to your agenda, your tools, and your collaborators.
- You run sessions from a room. Participants can join your sessions by visiting your room link.
- Recaps are also available for each room. You can access previous session recordings, chat logs, poll results, and more.
Each Butter room has its own permanent, customizable URL, so you only need to share the room link once and people can re-join it for every session.
What types of rooms should you create?
Because each room has its own agenda, tools, and collaborators, you should create a purpose-built room for each type of session you run. For example:
- A room for weekly stand-ups
- A room for design sprints
- A room for retrospectives
- A room for team socials
- A room for each client, etc.
Your options are limitless!
Basic members can create a maximum of 2 rooms. Pro members can create as many rooms as they’d like. See
Room roles
When you create a room, you are the room owner.
But nobody should Butter alone! You can invite collaborators to help you set up your rooms, and viewers who can see the agenda and their previous session recaps.
For full details on what each room role can do, check out
Rooms and workspaces
Every room is part of a workspace, making it easy to share your rooms with your team. You can make a room publicly visible to your entire workspace or hide it so that only people you invite to the room can find it.
If you can’t find a room, it might be another workspace! For more info, see
Inviting participants
To invite someone to a session in your room, you just need to send them the room link! They don’t need to be invited to the room as a collaborator or a viewer.
See
Start a session
When you’re ready to start a session in your room, you can either:
- Select ‘Start session’ from the room menu bar
- Select ‘Start session’ from the room in your workspace Home
- Visit the room link directly as the room owner or collaborator
See for more details.
Creating a room
You need at least one room to run a session! To create your first room, click ‘+ New Room’ in the top-right corner of the main Butter dashboard. You can also create a room from the Rooms tab.
You’ll be prompted to:
- Enter a room name: Make it good!
- Select a room cover photo: This will appear in your Rooms list and the waiting room (don’t worry, you can change it later)
- Select who can see this room: When your room is set to public, everyone in your workspace can see the room and join it. If your room is set to private, only the people you invite to the room can discover it.
Then, just click 'Create room' to get started.
Accessing your rooms
To access your rooms, go to the Rooms section of your workspace. Here, you’ll find your most Recently used rooms and a list of All rooms you have access to within your workspace.
The All rooms list dropdown lets you select between three types of rooms:
- Created by me: These are the rooms you own
- Shared with me: These are rooms you’ve been invited to as a collaborator or viewer
- All rooms: These are all of the above rooms, plus public rooms in your workspace. You can access these rooms as a viewer.
Setting up a room: Planning your sessions
To edit a room, navigate to the room from the Rooms menu and select ‘Setup’.
The room setup has seven tabs to help you customize your session experience:
1. Overview
The room Overview gives everyone an at at-a-glance view of everything in the room. This includes:
- The workspace description
- The people in the room (including the room owner, collaborators, and viewers)
- The room’s agenda
- The room’s toolbox (visible to collaborators only)
- Recent room recaps
2. Settings
The Settings tab lets you edit the room’s general settings, including the room name, URL, description, visibility, and recording defaults.
Set the room name and URL
You can customize the Room name and the Room URL to make your invite link more user friendly.
To make your room URL even more user-friendly, set your Workspace URL from your
Write a room description
You can also set a Description to explain the purpose of the room for your fellow collaborators! The description will only be visible to room viewers and collaborators (not participants).
Set the room to public or private
You can make your room discoverable to other members of your workspace by setting the room to public. When your room is set to public, anyone in your workspace can add themselves to the room as a viewer.
If you set the room to private, only people you invite to the room as collaborators or viewers will see the room.
Turn on automatic recording
Always forget to hit record? You can turn on automatic recording either when the session starts or when you start the agenda.
3. Waiting room
In the Waiting room tab, you can set your room’s cover photo, music, background color, agenda visibility, and more.
Your waiting room is where your participants land when they visit your room’s link. The waiting room is meant to set the mood before your session while your participants wait for you to admit them to the room.
Your waiting room is where your participants land when they visit your room’s link. The waiting room is meant to set the mood before your session while your participants wait for you to admit them to the room.
Your participants can set their video and audio up right in the waiting room - and even test them! It only takes about 30 seconds.
To learn how to set the mood with a waiting room, check out .
4. People
Butter is built for planning and running complex sessions, so sometimes you’ll need a hand from a collaborator.
In the People tab, you can invite people to join your room as collaborators or viewers. You can add people from your workspace or invite people via email.
To learn how to collaborate together on setting up your room, check out
5. Agenda
The room’s Agenda tab is where it all comes together into a smooth session plan.
Your
The kicker is that you can add your tools and activities directly to an agenda block! To access your tools during a live session, all you need to do is click ‘Start’ from the agenda block. 💫
For a full tutorial on how to use the Agenda Planner, check out
6. Toolbox
You can prepare specific resources or activities for each room from the Toolbox tab.
Any tool you add to your
Just select ‘+ Add Tool’ to add a tool to your room.
To learn how to load up tools before and during your sessions, check out:
7. Recaps
A room’s Recaps tab is home to all the previous
- The participant list
- Chat logs
- Shared and personal notes
- Poll results (collaborators only)
- Recordings (collaborators only)
Room collaborators will be able to access full recaps, whereas viewers will only be able to see participants, chat logs, and personal notes.
are not shared automatically with all participants, but you can share a recording link with participants after the session. You can even download and share the GIFs from your session’s recordings!
See
And then check out
Start a session
Once you’ve set up your room, it’s time to run a session! Just click ‘Start session’ on the right to get going.
Butter Rooms FAQ
Do I need to invite participants from the room setup for them to be able to join a session?
No! Anyone can join a Butter session. You just need to send them your room link. See
Do room collaborators have to be members of my workspace?
Nope! You can invite guests outside your workspace to collaborate on room setup. Room-level permissions are separate from workspace-level permissions.
Do room collaborators count towards my workspace Basic member limit?
No. Guest room collaborators don’t count towards your workspace.
Can guest room collaborators access my workspace library?
No. Only members of your workspace can access your library items.
See
Who can see my public rooms?
Only members of your workspace can see your public rooms. People outside your workspace can’t discover your room unless you invite them to it.