Copilot · 16 September 2026 · 7 min read
Microsoft uses one name for six products, four of them buyable in a Microsoft 365 tenant, at prices from zero to two thousand euros a year. What each one is, who it is for, and the one to pick for each job.
Microsoft uses the word Copilot for at least six different things, and four of them can be bought in a Microsoft 365 tenant. They are not editions of one product; they are different products with the same name, at prices from zero to €2,080 a year. This is the map: what each one is, who it is for, what it costs on the September 2026 price list, and which to choose for which purpose.
| What Microsoft calls it | What it is | Who it is for | Price, per user per month, annual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat | The free chat inside Microsoft 365: web-grounded answers, file upload, basic agents. Does not read your mailbox or SharePoint unless the user has a paid Copilot licence. | Everyone with a Business or Enterprise plan; the sanctioned replacement for personal ChatGPT accounts. | Included |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | The paid product: Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, grounded in your own mail, files, chats and meetings through Microsoft Graph, with the user’s permissions. Includes Copilot Studio for building agents within it. | Knowledge workers in organisations on Enterprise plans, or Business plans over the Business variant’s limits. | €26.00 (€312 a year) |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot Business | The same product at a lower price, for tenants on Business Basic, Standard or Premium, up to 300 seats. Also sold pre-bundled: “Business Premium with Copilot” is one SKU for both. | Companies under 300 people on a Business plan. | €18.20 (€218.40 a year) |
| Copilot Studio | The builder for your own agents: sources, instructions, actions, published to Teams or a website. Included with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence for that user’s own agents; bought as message capacity when agents serve people without Copilot licences. | IT, operations, HR — anyone with a repeatable question-and-action flow to hand to an agent. | Included with Copilot, or €173.30 per 25,000 messages |
| GitHub Copilot | A different product: AI in the code editor. Nothing to do with Microsoft 365 Copilot except the name and the parent company. | Software developers. | Sold through GitHub; not on this price list |
| Copilot in Windows / Edge / Bing | The consumer assistant in the operating system and the browser. Web-grounded, no company data, no licence. | Consumers; in a company, it is the thing to be aware of rather than to buy. | Free |
Prices are Microsoft list prices for the Europe region, September 2026, excluding VAT. Both Microsoft 365 Copilot SKUs are also sold on a monthly commitment at about 20% more.
Every Business and Enterprise plan includes Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat: a chat window in Teams, in the Microsoft 365 app and at m365.cloud.microsoft, answering from the web and from files the user uploads, under enterprise data protection — no training on your prompts, the same terms as your mailbox. It does not see the mailbox, SharePoint or Teams unless a paid licence is added. Its job in most companies is to be the sanctioned tool that replaces a personal ChatGPT account, at no cost, before anything is bought. Pay-as-you-go agents can be added to it through Azure.
This is the €26 licence: Copilot inside the Office apps, reading the company’s own data with the user’s own permissions. “Summarise this thread” in Outlook, “explain the variance” in Excel, “draft from the precedent” in Word, meeting recaps with action items in Teams. It needs a qualifying base plan — any Business plan, Office 365 E1/E3/E5, Microsoft 365 E3/E5, F1/F3 — and the desktop Office apps for the full experience. It also includes Copilot Studio for the licensed user, which is why a company that buys Copilot for its IT team gets the agent builder without a second purchase. Five companies, five departments shows where the hours come back.
Identical capability, €18.20 instead of €26, restricted to tenants on Business Basic, Standard or Premium and capped at 300 seats like the Business plans themselves. Microsoft also sells it pre-bundled: Business Premium with Copilot is one SKU at the combined price, which is a convenience rather than a discount. If your company is under 300 users on a Business plan, this is the one to buy; buying the €26 SKU would be paying more for the same product.
Copilot answers questions from what a person can see. Copilot Studio builds an agent with a job: the HR policy agent that answers from the handbook, the helpdesk agent that resets a password and opens a ticket, the onboarding agent that creates the folder and sends the document request. A user with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence can build and run agents for themselves and their team within it; when an agent is published to the whole company or to a website and used by people without Copilot licences, capacity is bought in message packs — €173.30 a month per 25,000 messages on an annual commitment, or pay-as-you-go through Azure. The user licence is zero-priced; the messages are the cost. How an agent is built, in six steps; one company’s two agents, with the numbers.
The name is the only thing shared. GitHub Copilot is AI in Visual Studio, VS Code and the terminal: code completion, chat about the codebase, pull-request summaries. It is bought through GitHub, per developer, and is included in Visual Studio Enterprise subscriptions. A company that wants AI for its developers buys this, not Microsoft 365 Copilot, and a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence gives a developer nothing in the editor.
Stop people pasting company data into personal AI accounts — Copilot Chat, today, at no cost, then Purview to flag uploads elsewhere.
Give knowledge workers AI inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams on the company’s own data — Microsoft 365 Copilot; the Business variant if you are under 300 on a Business plan. Start with twenty licences for the people whose routines are documents and meetings, not with the executive team.
Answer the same forty questions automatically, or hand a clerical process to a bot — Copilot Studio, on the Copilot licences you already have for the builders, with a message pack when the agent goes company-wide.
AI for the development team — GitHub Copilot, through GitHub or a Visual Studio subscription; not on this list.
A large document to analyse from scratch, or long-form writing that does not start from company files — this is where a frontier-model seat earns its place alongside Copilot; the comparison says when.
Copilot shows people what they are already permitted to see, which in a tenant older than a few years includes folders nobody remembers sharing. The permissions review comes before the first licence; it is the same fixed-price job every time, and it is the difference between a rollout and an incident. Price Copilot together with the plan it needs in the plan finder, or see every Copilot SKU with part numbers in the catalogue.
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