A clear guide to Microsoft Copilot pricing in 2025

Trying to figure out Microsoft’s pricing for its "Copilot" tools can feel a bit like nailing jello to a wall. It’s not just one product; it’s a whole family of AI assistants, each with its own features, target audience, and, of course, price tag. This makes it tough to know what you’re actually paying for and whether it’s the right tool for your team in the first place.

This guide is here to clear things up. We’ll walk through the different versions of Microsoft Copilot, explain the pricing for each one, and point out any hidden costs or requirements you need to know about. By the end, you’ll have a much better idea of which plan, if any, makes sense for you. We’ll also touch on why a purpose-built tool might be a more direct and cost-effective choice for specialized jobs like customer support.

Understanding the different Microsoft Copilot products

Before we get into the numbers, let’s get the names straight. "Copilot" is Microsoft’s brand for its army of generative AI assistants, all running on OpenAI’s tech like GPT-4. When you hear the name, it’s usually referring to one of three main product groups:

1. Microsoft Copilot (what used to be Bing Chat): This is the version you’ve probably seen built into the Bing search engine. It’s a free, web-based AI chat assistant for general questions, research, and content creation. It also has a paid "Pro" tier for individuals who need a bit more horsepower.

2. Copilot for Microsoft 365: This is the big one for businesses. It’s an enterprise-level assistant that plugs directly into the Microsoft 365 apps your team uses every day, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams. Its main trick is using your company’s own internal data for context, which makes its answers super relevant to your work.

3. GitHub Copilot: This one is a specialized tool made just for software developers. It lives inside their code editor and acts like an AI pair programmer, suggesting lines of code and even whole functions to help them build faster.

Just to add to the fun, a few other companies use the "Copilot" name for their own tools in different fields, from finance to sales. For this guide, we’re sticking strictly to what Microsoft offers.

A complete breakdown of Copilot pricing plans

Alright, now that we know what we’re talking about, let’s get into the cost of each plan.

Pricing for Microsoft Copilot (Free) and Copilot Pro

If you’re an individual user, these are the two plans you’ll be choosing between. They’re built for personal use, creating content, and general research.

Microsoft Copilot (Free version)

• Cost: Free.

• Features: The free version gives you access to GPT models for chatting, summarizing documents, and writing content. It’s built right into Bing search and the Microsoft Edge browser. You also get a limited number of "boosts" for creating images faster with Designer (formerly Bing Image Creator).

• Limitations: The main catch is that you get lower priority during peak hours, which can mean slower responses. You also have a daily cap on image creation, and it doesn’t connect with any of the Microsoft 365 desktop apps. It’s a handy tool for casual use, but it’s not designed for a heavy workload.

Copilot Pro

• Cost: $20 per user, per month.

• Features: Copilot Pro includes everything in the free plan and gives it a serious boost. You get priority access to the latest models, like GPT-4 Turbo, so you won’t get slowed down when things are busy. You also get 100 boosts per day for creating AI images. The real draw, though, is its integration with the web and desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook if you have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription. This lets you use AI to draft documents, analyze data, and summarize emails right inside the apps you already use.

• Who it’s for: This plan is aimed at power users, freelance writers, students, or anyone who wants faster, more reliable AI performance and the convenience of using it within their personal Microsoft 365 apps.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 pricing

This is where things get serious, and a lot more expensive. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is designed to be the central AI brain for your entire organization, learning from your internal documents and data to provide genuinely helpful, context-aware assistance.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 (Business & Enterprise)

• Cost: $30 per user, per month, with an annual commitment.

• The "Hidden" Prerequisite: This is the most important part: the $30 fee is an add-on. To even buy it, each user must already have a license for Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, or E5. Those licenses range from $12.50 to $57 per user per month. This means the actual cost to get one employee set up with Copilot could be anywhere from $42.50 to $87 per month. That’s a huge detail to factor into your budget.

• Features: This plan is deeply woven into the entire Microsoft 365 suite. It can summarize Teams meetings you missed, draft proposals in Word from your notes, create PowerPoint presentations from a simple prompt, analyze data in Excel, and help you get through your Outlook inbox faster. It’s all connected to your organization’s data via the Microsoft Graph, so it understands your projects, your team, and your company’s unique context. It also includes the enterprise-level security and privacy you’d expect from Microsoft.

• Limitations & Considerations: The steep, non-negotiable per-user cost is a major investment, especially for large teams where you’d have to license every single person. It also locks you firmly into the Microsoft ecosystem; the more you rely on it, the harder it is to imagine leaving. More importantly, its knowledge is stuck inside Microsoft’s world. If your teams use tools like Confluence, Google Docs, or helpdesks like Zendesk, its AI is flying blind. For a support AI to actually be helpful, it needs to see everything. An assistant that can’t access your main knowledge base or past ticket history is only giving you half the story.

GitHub Copilot pricing for developers

Finally, let’s look at the pricing for the developer-focused tool. GitHub Copilot is all about writing code faster and better, and its pricing is set up for everyone from solo coders to huge enterprise teams.

GitHub Copilot Individual

• Cost: $10 per user, per month or $100 for the year. It’s also free for verified students and people who maintain popular open-source projects.

• Features: You get smart, context-aware code suggestions right inside your editor (like VS Code or JetBrains). It can finish single lines of code or suggest entire functions, and it works with dozens of programming languages.

GitHub Copilot Business

• Cost: $19 per user, per month.

• Features: This plan has everything from the Individual tier but adds features for teams. You get a central place to manage licenses and set organization-wide policies. Crucially, GitHub guarantees that your company’s code won’t be used to train its public models, keeping your intellectual property safe.

GitHub Copilot Enterprise

• Cost: $39 per user, per month.

• Features: This is the top-tier plan. It builds on the Business features with even more advanced tools, like a Copilot Chat that’s personalized to your team’s specific codebase, the ability to automatically summarize pull requests, and deeper integration with the GitHub.com platform. You do need a separate GitHub Enterprise Cloud subscription for this one.

• Who it’s for: This tool is strictly for software developers. It’s not going to help you with general business tasks, marketing copy, or customer support tickets.

A side-by-side look at Copilot pricing

To put it all in one place, here’s a table that sums up the different Microsoft Copilot plans, their costs, and who they’re really for. This should give you a clear, at-a-glance overview to help you decide.

Product Family	Plan	Price (per user/month)	Ideal User	Key Prerequisite
Microsoft Copilot	Free	$0	Casual, individual users	None
	Pro	$20	Power users, content creators	M365 Personal/Family (for app integration)
Copilot for M365	Business / Enterprise	$30	Businesses & enterprises	M365 Business/E3/E5 license
GitHub Copilot	Individual	$10	Individual developers	None
	Business	$19	Development teams	None
	Enterprise	$39	Large development orgs	GitHub Enterprise Cloud license

This video provides a helpful overview of the different Microsoft Copilot licenses to clarify the various pricing structures.

Is Copilot the right fit for your support team?

While Microsoft’s tools are undeniably powerful for general office work, they weren’t built for the unique, fast-paced world of customer support or ITSM. The high per-user pricing, deep lock-in to one ecosystem, and complex setup can be major hurdles for support leaders who just need a practical AI solution that works.

This is where a purpose-built platform like eesel AI comes in. It’s an AI assistant created specifically for support teams that plugs directly into the tools you’re already using, like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Slack, and Confluence. Instead of making you switch to a new ecosystem, it works within yours.

Here’s how a specialized tool like eesel AI is different:

• You can get started in minutes, not months. Forget about long sales calls and mandatory demos. With eesel AI, you can sign up and connect your helpdesk and knowledge bases in a few clicks. It’s designed to be self-serve.

• It connects all your knowledge. eesel AI doesn’t just read your Word docs. It connects to all your scattered sources of information, from past tickets and macros to Google Docs and Notion, giving it the full picture it needs to resolve customer issues accurately.

eesel AI connects with all your existing tools like Zendesk, Slack, and Confluence to access your complete knowledge base.

• You can test it with confidence. Before letting the AI talk to a single customer, you can run a simulation on thousands of your past tickets. This feature shows you exactly how it will perform and gives you a clear forecast of your potential automation rate.

• The pricing is transparent and predictable. eesel AI’s plans are based on the number of AI interactions, not a flat fee for every user. This is often far more cost-effective for support teams and means you won’t get a surprise bill after a busy month.

Making the right choice for your business

Microsoft offers a complex but powerful set of AI tools under the Copilot umbrella. As we’ve seen, the Copilot pricing changes a lot depending on whether you’re an individual, a business, or a developer.

For boosting general productivity inside the Microsoft ecosystem, Copilot for M365 is a strong, if pricey, option. For writing code, GitHub Copilot is pretty much the undisputed champ.

But for specialized roles like customer support and ITSM, it’s worth looking at platforms built for your specific workflows, tools, and budget. A solution that can bring all your knowledge together, prove its value before you commit, and offer straightforward pricing will almost always give you a faster and better return on your investment.

Ready to see what an AI built from the ground up for support teams can do? Try eesel AI for free and see how quickly you can automate resolutions and help out your agents.