If you’ve been following our Frog Blog, you’ll know we recently broke down the differences between ChatGPT and Claude, and which one your business should be using. We ended that post with a teaser: where does Microsoft Copilot fit into all of this?

That’s exactly what we’re covering today. Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude are the three AI tools businesses ask us about most. They’re not interchangeable, and choosing the wrong one for the wrong job costs time and money. Here’s the honest breakdown.

What is Microsoft Copilot, and how is it different?

ChatGPT and Claude are standalone AI assistants. You open them in a browser, type a prompt, and get a response. They’re powerful general-purpose tools, but they sit outside your existing workflow.

Copilot is different. It’s an AI layer embedded directly inside Microsoft 365: Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It knows your emails, your calendar, your documents, and your meeting history through Microsoft Graph. The pitch isn’t “here’s a smarter AI.” It’s “here’s AI that already knows your work.”

That distinction matters more than most people realise when they’re evaluating which tool to adopt.

girl with mom playing with cards to spot differences

Copilot pricing: what you actually pay

Copilot’s headline price is straightforward. Microsoft 365 Copilot costs around £13–£22 per user per month as an add-on to an existing qualifying Microsoft 365 plan. There’s also a free tier, Copilot Chat, included with eligible M365 business and enterprise subscriptions, which gives you AI chat grounded in web data and basic file handling.

However, the real cost of Copilot is higher than the list price suggests. Here’s what catches businesses out:

  • You need a qualifying M365 licence first. Copilot is an add-on, not a standalone product. If you’re on a basic plan, you may need to upgrade before you can add Copilot at all.
  • Copilot Credits introduce usage variability. When Copilot or an agent performs tasks (summarising, answering, generating content, completing actions) it consumes credits. As adoption grows, this layer can make costs harder to forecast.
  • Agents beyond M365 require Copilot Studio and Azure. If you want Copilot to work in external channels, service desks, or custom portals, you’ll need Copilot Studio and an Azure subscription on top of everything else.
  • Tenant readiness work is invisible in the list price. Governance, permissions, content clean-up, and data boundary configuration all take time and internal resource before Copilot delivers reliable results.
  • Pricing is increasing from July 2026. Microsoft has announced changes to Microsoft 365 suite pricing effective July 1, 2026, tied to expanded AI and security capabilities rolling into the platform. Now is a sensible time to review your licence estate before those changes land.

None of this is a reason to avoid Copilot, but going in with open eyes on cost is essential.

What Copilot does well

Where Copilot earns its cost is in the seamless, in-app experience. A few areas where it genuinely stands out:

  • Meeting summaries in Teams. This is Copilot’s strongest use case. Join a Teams meeting, and Copilot can summarise what was discussed, list action items, and tell you what you missed if you joined late, all without leaving Teams. No copy-pasting transcripts into another tool.
  • Email assistance in Outlook. Copilot can draft replies, summarise long email threads, and flag key points from your inbox. For anyone dealing with a high volume of email, this alone can recoup significant time.
  • Content creation inside Word and PowerPoint. Copilot can draft documents in Word or convert an existing document into a PowerPoint presentation. It works within the app with no context-switching required. That said, it works best when converting existing content rather than generating from scratch, and outputs often need editing before they’re presentation-ready.
  • Context from across your organisation. Because Copilot is grounded in Microsoft Graph, it can surface relevant emails, files, and meeting notes as context when you ask it something. That kind of organisational awareness isn’t something ChatGPT or Claude can replicate without significant custom integration work.

Where Copilot falls short

Copilot is primarily a productivity layer that makes individual tasks faster within Microsoft 365 apps. For more demanding use cases, it runs into clear limitations:

  • Writing quality. Copilot produces serviceable output, but it doesn’t match Claude for precision or ChatGPT for creative volume. If your team produces client-facing reports, technical documentation, or detailed analysis, the gap is noticeable.
  • Long document handling. Claude was built with a very large context window and can hold an entire lengthy document in a single session. Copilot, working within the constraints of Office apps, doesn’t offer that level of deep document reasoning.
  • Complex reasoning. For demanding analytical or technical tasks, OpenAI’s o1 and o3 reasoning models (available through ChatGPT) are purpose-built for multi-step problem solving in a way Copilot isn’t designed to match.
  • Reliability and hallucinations. All three tools can produce inaccurate outputs, but Claude has the strongest tendency to flag uncertainty rather than present guesses confidently. In compliance-sensitive environments, that matters.

So which tool should you use, and when?

someone with a toolbox open, trying to choose which tool to use.

The answer, for most businesses, isn’t “pick one and ignore the rest.” Different tools serve different jobs. Here’s the practical guide:

Use Copilot when:

  • Your team works in Microsoft 365 for most of their day
  • Meeting summaries and Teams integration are a priority
  • You want AI embedded in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint without context-switching
  • Your organisation already has Microsoft 365 and a straightforward procurement path
  • Data governance and staying within your Microsoft tenant is a hard requirement

Use ChatGPT when:

  • You need broad integrations with third-party tools (Zapier, Salesforce, HubSpot, and hundreds more)
  • Non-technical teams need to build purpose-specific AI assistants without development work
  • You have demanding technical or scientific reasoning requirements (o1/o3 models)
  • Speed and volume of output matters more than refinement

Use Claude when:

  • Your work is document-intensive: contracts, reports, research, long-form writing
  • Output quality and precision are important to your brand or profession
  • You operate in a regulated sector (healthcare, legal, financial services) and need predictable, measured AI behaviour
  • You’re doing technical work such as code review, documentation, or analytical writing where accuracy matters more than speed

The honest summary

Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude are solving related but different problems. Copilot wins on integration and context. It lives where your team already works, knows your organisation’s data, and removes friction from everyday Microsoft 365 tasks. ChatGPT wins on ecosystem breadth and reasoning power. Claude wins on output quality and reliability for precision-critical work.

For many businesses, the right answer is to run Copilot alongside one of the standalone tools. Copilot handles the in-app productivity layer; Claude or ChatGPT handles the heavier lifting. The cost of running both is modest, and the productivity gain from matching the right tool to each job is real.

If you’d like help working out which combination makes sense for your team and how to integrate these tools into your workflows properly, get in touch with the Purple Frog team. It’s exactly the kind of problem we enjoy solving.

This post builds on our earlier comparison of ChatGPT vs Claude: which AI should your business be using? Worth reading alongside this one.

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