Microsoft Copilot Review (2026): Pricing, Features, Pros & Cons

Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant, and the name covers two different products that people search for together. The consumer Copilot is a free chat assistant on the web, in Windows and in mobile apps, built on OpenAI's models with Microsoft's own additions, that answers questions, writes, summarises and generates images. The other Copilot lives inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, drafting documents, summarising email threads, building spreadsheets and sitting in meetings, and that one is paid.

For individuals, the former Copilot Pro plan is now sold as Microsoft 365 Premium. Microsoft's store page lists it at $19.99 a month or $199.99 a year with a one-month free trial, and describes Copilot across Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, drafting emails and summarising long threads, plus extensive usage for creating AI images. The free Copilot app remains available with a Microsoft account; Microsoft does not publish its usage limits as fixed numbers.

For businesses, Microsoft's pricing page lists Microsoft 365 Copilot Business as an add-on at $18 a user a month billed yearly, discounted from $21 until 31 December 2026, or $25.20 monthly, requiring a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence for up to 300 users. It bundles Copilot in the Office apps, AI chat connected to work data, reasoning agents for research and analysis, pre-built agents such as Researcher and Analyst, and model choice. Business Standard with Copilot is $23.50 a user a month yearly and Business Premium with Copilot $32. Copilot Chat, the work-data chat without the in-app features, is included at no additional cost with eligible Microsoft 365 plans, which is the version most office workers have without knowing it.

The practical question is which Copilot you are being offered. If the pitch is "AI in Word and Excel", that is the paid one, and for an individual it costs the same $19.99 a month as ChatGPT Plus while buying a different thing: ChatGPT is the better chat assistant, and Copilot is the one that edits the document you are in. If the pitch is a free chatbot, the Copilot app competes with the free tiers of ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, with the advantage of living in Windows and the disadvantage of fewer features than the subscription assistants. Our comparisons of Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini against GitHub Copilot cover the coding product of the same name, which is a separate subscription from GitHub.