Microsoft AI

Best for: Individuals and families who want premium Copilot inside the consumer Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote) at home.

• $19.99/month or $199.99/year — bundles Microsoft 365 Family (six accounts, 1TB OneDrive each) plus premium Copilot capabilities
• Replaced the standalone Copilot Pro tier in late 2025 — Pro is no longer sold
• Priority access to the latest models, higher Designer image-generation limits, and Copilot inside Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Outlook/OneNote
• Includes premium AI features such as Researcher and Deep Research that go beyond the free Copilot tier
• Microsoft 365 Personal at $9.99/month is the lower step with reduced Copilot allowances; Premium at $16.67/month effective is the upgrade

Limitations: Aimed at consumer accounts — uses your personal Microsoft account, not work/school. Does not ground answers in organizational SharePoint, Teams, or Exchange data; that requires the business Microsoft 365 Copilot SKU.

Best for: Organizations that want AI embedded inside the Office apps employees already live in, grounded in their own SharePoint, Teams, and Exchange content.

• Microsoft 365 Copilot Business — $18/user/month under the promotional rate through June 30, 2026; rises to $21/user/month from July 1, 2026. Caps at 300 users
• Microsoft 365 Copilot (Enterprise) — $30/user/month, billed annually, as an add-on to a qualifying Microsoft 365 base license
• Agentic capabilities are now generally available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint — Copilot can take multi-step, app-native actions and edit local files on Windows and Mac
• Work IQ pulls relevant context automatically from email, meetings, chats, and files inside the tenant
• Copilot Chat is now embedded across Teams chats, channels, calling, and meetings; mobile rollout in progress
• Citations are auto-displayed when responses use web or Work IQ sources, so users can verify provenance

Limitations: SharePoint Online required for organizational grounding, Exchange Online for email features, Teams for meeting summaries. Quality of answers depends heavily on tenant hygiene — messy permissions and stale content surface in results. Per-user license, not consumption-based, so unused seats are pure overhead.

Best for: Code completion, in-IDE chat, and agent-mode coding tasks across the Microsoft and GitHub developer ecosystem.

• Free — 2,000 completions/month and ~50 premium chat requests/month; access to a limited set of models
• Pro — $10/user/month + $10 AI Credits/month (from June 1, 2026): unlimited completions, premium models in chat, Copilot cloud agent
• Pro+ — $39/user/month + $39 AI Credits/month (from June 1, 2026): full access to all available models in Copilot Chat including Opus 4.7 (Pro+ only); not available on Pro
• Business — $19/user/month + $19 AI Credits/month (from June 1, 2026): organization policy controls, audit, admin management, Copilot cloud agent
• Enterprise — $39/user/month: knowledge bases (index org repos for chat answers), GitHub.com Chat, custom model fine-tuning
• Agent Mode and the Coding Agent can plan, edit multiple files, run tests, and open pull requests autonomously

Limitations: New sign-ups for Pro, Pro+, and student plans were temporarily paused starting April 20, 2026 as Microsoft retooled the billing model. The transition to usage-based billing lands June 1, 2026 — each paid tier now bundles a monthly AI Credit allowance (Pro $10, Pro+ $39, Business $19), and consumption beyond it is metered. Opus 4.7 access is restricted to Pro+ (not Pro) as of the June 2026 billing change. Code suggestions can drift from project conventions without strong context.

Best for: Building production apps on top of OpenAI models with Azure's networking, regional deployment, identity, and compliance controls instead of going direct to OpenAI.

• Hosts the same OpenAI models as the OpenAI API — GPT-5, GPT-5 mini, GPT-5 nano, GPT-5.4 series, plus image, audio, and embedding models
• GPT-5 Global: $1.25 / $10 per million input/output tokens; cached input $0.13. GPT-5-mini: $0.25 / $2. GPT-5-nano: $0.05 / $0.40
• GPT-5 Pro: $15 / $120 per million tokens. GPT-5.4 Pro: $30 / $180 per million tokens
• Two billing modes: pay-as-you-go (per token) or Provisioned Throughput Units (PTUs) for reserved, predictable capacity
• Batch API runs at 50% of standard token prices with results within 24 hours
• Private VNet, Entra ID, content filtering, region pinning, and Azure SLA — the things enterprises typically cannot get from OpenAI direct

Limitations: New model versions land on Azure later than on the OpenAI API. Some models require approval-gated access. Quota is per region per subscription — capacity planning is on you. Pricing is for inference only; the surrounding Azure infrastructure (storage, networking, monitoring) is billed separately.

Best for: Building, deploying, and governing AI applications and agents at the enterprise scale — the unified portal that replaced Azure AI Studio.

• Hub-and-project architecture covering the full AI lifecycle: prototyping, prompt engineering, evaluation, deployment, monitoring
• Foundry Models — one catalog spanning OpenAI, Mistral, Meta Llama, Cohere, plus Microsoft's Phi family and partner models
• Foundry Agent Service — durable, multi-step agents with tool use, memory, and orchestration across multiple agents
• Foundry IQ — the evolution of Azure AI Search; retrieval, ranking, and grounding for RAG pipelines
• Foundry Tools, Foundry Control Plane, and Foundry Local for tooling, governance, and on-device runs
• Integrates with Azure Machine Learning, Azure OpenAI, and Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility

Limitations: Naming has churned — Azure AI Studio to Azure AI Foundry to Microsoft Foundry — and older docs still reference the old names. Steeper learning curve than the consumer Copilots; really intended for engineering teams. Costs accrue across multiple underlying Azure services, so estimating spend is harder than a flat per-seat license.

Best for: Business teams who want to build custom AI agents that surface inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams, websites, or other channels — without writing a full Foundry deployment.

• Two paths: in-context Agent Builder inside Microsoft 365 Copilot for lightweight personal/team agents, and standalone Copilot Studio for shareable, multi-channel agents
• Sold as tenant-wide Copilot Credit packs: $200/pack/month for 25,000 credits, or pay-as-you-go meter for consumption billing
• Save up to 20% with up-front Copilot Credit Commit Units
• Visual designer for topics, triggers, knowledge sources, actions, and conversation flows; advanced authors can drop into Power Fx and Power Automate
• Publish agents to Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, websites, Slack, custom apps, or telephony channels
• Microsoft launched an AI Agent Builder certification track in 2026 — the role is becoming a recognized job function

Limitations: Credit-based metering means agent costs scale with usage and can surprise teams that price agents like flat-fee SaaS. Agents that publish outside the Microsoft 365 tenant require the standalone plan. Deeper customization (custom models, fine-tuning, complex orchestration) belongs in Microsoft Foundry, not Copilot Studio.

Best for: Local, on-device AI experiences baked into Windows 11 — voice, captions, image editing, and search across what you've recently seen.

• The Copilot app on Windows 11 is the same web Copilot, surfaced as a native app and via Win+C / taskbar entry
• Copilot+ PCs require an NPU rated 40+ TOPS (Snapdragon X, Intel Core Ultra Series 2, AMD Ryzen AI 300+) to unlock exclusive features
• Recall (preview, opt-in only): periodically captures screenshots and builds a searchable on-device index of what you have seen, so you can find prior work via natural language
• Live Captions with real-time translation across 40+ languages; Cocreator in Paint; Generative Erase in Photos; Studio Effects for camera
• Most Copilot+ AI runs locally on the NPU — no cloud round-trip, no subscription required for the OS-level features themselves

Limitations: Microsoft is actively scaling back Copilot integration in Windows 11 in 2026 after user pushback — Copilot is being removed from Notepad, Paint, and other in-box apps. Recall launch was rocky on security grounds; Microsoft is reportedly considering reworking or rebranding it. Most Copilot+ features only work on certified hardware, so older PCs are excluded even after Windows updates.