Core concepts
Five words carry the whole product: workspace, panel, section, row and tab. Learn these and every other page in the guide reads easily.
They nest, in that order. A workspace holds panels, a panel holds sections, a section holds rows, and tabs are the different ways of looking at all of it.
Workspace
One company, team or project. Everything lives inside a workspace — its panels, its members, its roles, its settings, its integrations and its billing — and nothing crosses between workspaces. A panel in one is invisible from another.
You can belong to several. An agency might keep one workspace per client; a company might keep one for Support and one for Sales if the two teams should not see each other's records at all. Switching between them is ⌘K / Ctrl+K → Switch workspace.
Panel
One kind of thing you track: Leads, Tickets, Orders, Candidates, Tasks. A panel owns its columns, its data, and who may see it.
A panel has a type, chosen when you create it, which decides the columns it starts with and the features it offers — Standard, Ticketing, Social Chats, Email Campaign or Report. See Panels for what each type gives you.
Section
A tab-like split inside a panel: 2024 vs 2025, North vs South, Open vs Archive. Every row lives in exactly one section, and the section switcher remembers where you were.
Sections are the permanent divisions of a panel. They are not the same as filters — a filter is a temporary lens you apply this visit, while a section is where the row actually lives. Moving a row between sections is a deliberate act.
Row
One record: one lead, one ticket, one order. Opening a row gives you the record view — every field, plus the full history of what happened to it.
Tab
A way of looking at the panel. Tabs never change the data, only the view, and a panel can have as many as you like:
| Tab | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Main Table | The full table with the toolbar above it. Created with the panel. |
| Filter Table | The same table with a saved filter always applied. |
| Graphs | Chart widgets built from this panel's columns — the source of dashboard pins. |
| Pipeline | A Kanban board, one column per status, drag a card to change it. |
| Chat Inbox | Conversations on the left, the thread on the right. |
Two more you will meet constantly
Owner
The member responsible for a row. Owner is not just another column — filters, automations, notifications and the “only see my own rows” permission are all built on it. If you set up nothing else, set up owners.
Activity
The timeline attached to every row: field changes, emails, notes, meetings, chats. Nothing is silently overwritten — the record keeps its own history, and you can always see what a field used to be and who changed it.
Entries made by the system are signed Cognify AI. Anything that arrived from outside the workspace — an inbound email, a public form — shows as User.
How they fit together
A worked example. A support team creates a workspace called Acme Support. In it they create a Ticketing panel called Tickets, which arrives with Ticket ID, Ticket Status and Category columns already in place. They add two sections: Live and Archive. Every incoming email becomes a row in Live. They add a Pipeline tab so the team can drag tickets across statuses, and a Graphs tab to chart volume by category. Each ticket's owner drives who gets notified, and its activity holds the whole email thread.
Same five words, whatever you are building.