Labels

Team-scoped tags for classifying work, what they are good for, and the one failure mode worth avoiding.

Available Updated 2026-09-24

Labels are coloured tags on issues. An issue can carry any number of them, and they filter everywhere.

Team-scoped

A label belongs to a team. Creating bug in one team does not create it in another, and two teams can use the same name for different things without colliding. This follows from teams owning their data — see Companies and teams.

The practical effect: when you set up a second team, its labels start empty.

Creating and applying

Create, rename and recolour labels under Settings → Teams → Labels for the active team. The current settings interface shows this management panel to company admins. An issue’s label picker applies or removes existing labels; it does not create them. Each label has a name and a colour.

Apply them from the issue, or press l on an open issue to open the picker directly.

What to use them for

Labels are the dimension your team invents. The ones that earn their place tend to be:

  • Area — frontend, api, infra
  • Type — bug, feature, chore
  • State that is not status — blocked, needs-design, waiting-on-customer
  • Effort — small, large

Type and area are the two that make filters worth saving.

The one failure mode

Labels are cheap to create and expensive to maintain. A team that adds one per situation ends up with forty labels, of which six are used, and filtering gets worse rather than better — because a filter is only useful if labels are applied consistently, and nobody applies forty consistently.

Keep the set small enough that everyone knows it. If you need a dimension with more than about eight values, it is probably a project or a status column, not a label.

Deleting a label

Deleting a label removes it and its issue assignments for the team. This action is not currently registered in the app’s undo history. Check the label and its uses before deleting it; recreating the name does not restore its assignments.

  • Filters and saved views — the reason to have labels at all.
  • Issues — the other fields, and which ones a label should not be substituting for.

Something here wrong, missing or out of date? Tell us at support@orneos.com — corrections to these pages are welcome and we would rather hear it than have you work around it.