The plan most people came here for no longer exists
If you arrived looking for Copilot Pro, stop. Microsoft withdrew it from sale, and support for existing subscribers ended on 1 August 2026. The named replacement is Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99 a month.
That matters because the line-up either side of it has moved too, and the shape is unusual: there is no plan here that sells you only an assistant. Free Copilot works in a browser with no account. Microsoft 365 Personal at $9.99 a month, or $8.33 on annual billing, buys the Office desktop apps with Copilot inside them and a terabyte of storage. Family at $12.99 extends that to six people. For businesses, Microsoft 365 Copilot is $30 per user per month.
Every paid rung is an Office subscription with AI attached. If you do not want Office, none of them is priced for you.
Sixty credits a month, and why a small number beats a hidden one
Microsoft 365 Personal and Family include sixty AI credits a month for in-app Copilot actions: drafting, rewriting, summarising, analysing, generating an image. Vision runs ten minutes a day and Voice thirty. Premium raises those to fifteen and sixty minutes and adds twenty five agent tasks a month shared across the Tasks, Analyst and Researcher agents.
Sixty is not many. A working week of drafting in Word will find the edge of it.
It is still the most useful number in this category, because it is the only place a consumer is told what a paid assistant allowance actually is. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all express their paid consumer allowance as a multiple of another plan and never publish the figure being multiplied.
Spend the first month finding the edge on purpose
Sixty credits is small enough to exhaust deliberately. Run a normal fortnight, then check what is left, and you will know before renewal whether Personal fits or whether you needed Premium. Nobody else in this category lets you run that test, because nobody else publishes a number to test against.
The thirty dollar tier is a surcharge, not a price
The business number needs reading carefully. Microsoft 365 Copilot is an add-on, not a plan. It requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence underneath it, such as Business Standard or E3, so the real per-seat cost is that figure plus whatever the base licence costs. A comparison against a thirty dollar assistant elsewhere is not comparing like with like.
There is a softer entry that most write-ups miss. Copilot Chat is included at no extra cost with an eligible Microsoft 365 plan and carries Enterprise Data Protection. An organisation can put a governed assistant in front of every seat before it buys a single add-on licence, then buy the add-on only for the people who hit the wall. For a rollout, that is a materially better shape than a per-seat decision taken up front.
The only vendor here that does not train on you
Microsoft states that prompts, responses and file contents in Microsoft 365 apps are not used to train foundation models. That applies on consumer plans and commercial ones alike, and there is no setting to change because there is nothing to turn off.
Set that against the field. Gemini keeps consumer chats eighteen months by default and trains on them. Claude makes it a choice with five year retention attached when the choice is left on. Perplexity trains by default and says plainly that opting out does not remove what was already used.
On commercial plans, Enterprise Data Protection applies automatically at no extra cost: prompts and responses fall under the same contractual terms as your Exchange and SharePoint data, encrypted, tenant-isolated, and respecting the permissions and sensitivity labels you already have. Admins get retention through Microsoft Purview and agent allow lists in the admin centre.
What Microsoft does not publish is a retention period in days for stored prompts, on either side. That single gap is why this does not score higher still under how we rate.
Where a general assistant beats it
Copilot scores 7.6 and capability is the larger drag, with value close behind. Sixty credits is tight, the free tier publishes no ceiling at all, and no individual plan grants API access: the nine documented Copilot APIs need a commercial licence on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription.
The deeper limitation is the one from the first section. This is not an assistant you buy, it is an assistant that comes with an Office subscription. If you want one prompt box for writing, analysis, code and research and you do not need it inside Excel, you are paying for the wrong half of the product. That is what sends people to ChatGPT at similar money, and it is why Copilot sits in the also considered list of our assistant comparison rather than in the four.
Who should stay on the free tier
Free Copilot is genuinely usable and needs no account, which is rarer than it sounds. If your use is occasional and browser-based, stay there.
Pay when the work is inside your own files, because that is the only thing the paid tiers do that the free one cannot. And if you are buying for an organisation, turn on Copilot Chat across the tenant first and let usage tell you who needs a seat, rather than guessing.
Prices, credit allowances and data terms on this page were checked against the vendor pricing pages, Microsoft support articles and Microsoft Learn documentation on .
