Microsoft Edge Copilot vs GitHub Copilot: Which one is right for you?

It feels like Microsoft has slapped the "Copilot" brand on just about everything lately, doesn't it? It’s in your Windows taskbar, your browser, your Office apps, and even your coding tools. With all these different versions floating around, it’s easy to get mixed up. What’s the actual difference? Are they free? And is any of them actually useful for your day-to-day job?

Let's cut through the noise. We’re going to look at two of the most talked-about versions: Microsoft Edge Copilot and GitHub Copilot. They might share a name, but they’re built for completely different people with totally different goals.

This guide will give you a straightforward comparison of what they do, who they're for, and what they cost. By the end, you'll know exactly which tool fits your needs, and just as importantly, when you might need something else entirely.

What is Microsoft Edge Copilot?

Think of Microsoft Edge Copilot (you might remember it as Bing Chat) as your general-purpose AI sidekick that lives right inside the Edge browser and Windows. Its main job is to be a research assistant and a creative partner for the kinds of things you do every day. It’s designed to make browsing the web and creating simple content a bit faster and less of a chore.

Here’s what it’s pretty good at:

• Answering questions: It can pull information from the web to give you a quick answer, saving you from having to click through a dozen search results.

• Summarizing content: If you're looking at a long article or a dense PDF, Copilot can give you the highlights in a few seconds.

• Drafting text: It can help you bang out a quick email, brainstorm ideas for a social media post, or give you a starting point for a blog post.

• Generating images: You can feed it a text prompt and it will create an image for you, which can be handy for a presentation or a creative project.

At its core, Edge Copilot is for anyone who wants a little productivity boost. Its main strength is that it’s connected to the internet. It’s built for general knowledge work, not for handling the specific, operational tasks that keep a business running.

What is GitHub Copilot?

GitHub Copilot, on the other hand, is a whole different animal. It’s a highly specialized tool that acts as an "AI pair programmer" for software developers. You won’t find it hanging out in your browser sidebar; it lives directly inside a developer's code editor (their Integrated Development Environment, or IDE), like Visual Studio Code.

Its entire reason for existing is to help people write, fix, and understand code more efficiently. Here’s a peek at what it does:

• Suggests code: As a developer types, it suggests lines of code and even entire functions, which saves a ton of time writing repetitive stuff.

• Turns words into code: You can write a comment in plain English describing what you want a function to do, and GitHub Copilot will try to generate the code for you.

• Explains code: If you're staring at a confusing chunk of code someone else wrote, you can ask Copilot to explain what it does in simple terms.

• Helps with testing: It can help write unit tests to check if the code works as expected and assist in hunting down bugs.

GitHub Copilot has been trained on a massive amount of public code from GitHub, making it an incredibly powerful assistant for technical folks. For anyone who doesn't write code for a living, it's pretty much useless.

Microsoft Edge Copilot vs GitHub Copilot: Key differences

Now that we have a feel for them, let's put them side-by-side to see where they really differ.

Scope and intended user

This is the biggest dividing line. They’re built for two completely separate groups of people.

• Microsoft Edge Copilot is for the general user. Think students doing research, marketers brainstorming ad copy, or any professional who needs to quickly summarize articles. Its scope is broad, informational, and not at all technical.

• GitHub Copilot is exclusively for software developers, data scientists, and anyone else whose job involves writing code. Its scope is narrow, deeply technical, and all about the software development process.

It’s also worth pointing out that neither of these tools is meant for specialized business jobs like customer support or IT service management. Those roles need AI that can connect to specific business systems (like a help desk) and actually perform tasks, which is a whole different level of capability.

Core functionality and integration

How and where they work are also miles apart.

• Microsoft Edge Copilot works within the Edge browser, Windows, and Microsoft 365 apps. It uses the context of the webpage you're on to provide summaries and answers. But as many people have discovered, its ability to actually do things is pretty limited. It can give you information, but it can't interact with your local files or take actions for you.

• GitHub Copilot plugs directly into IDEs like VS Code and the broader GitHub platform. It works inside your codebase, analyzing your project files to give you relevant suggestions. It can write real, functional code that can perform incredibly complex tasks once it's run.

This brings up a really important point. GitHub Copilot demonstrates the power of an AI that can do things by writing code. But what about the millions of business professionals who need an AI to take action without having to become a developer?

That’s where platforms like eesel AI step in. They fill the gap for teams in roles like customer support or IT, giving them a no-code way to build AI agents that can take real action, like triaging tickets, looking up order information, or escalating an issue to the right person.

The crucial role of "actions" and automation

A truly helpful AI assistant doesn't just feed you information; it takes action. This is the brick wall most general-purpose chatbots run into.

For example, a user on a forum wanted to download all the PDFs from a single webpage. Microsoft Edge Copilot could summarize the page for them, but it couldn't actually download the files. GitHub Copilot could write a Python script to do it, but that's only helpful if you know how to run a script.

This highlights a common headache for business teams. A support agent doesn't need a script; they need an AI that can instantly look up a customer's order in Shopify, tag their ticket in Zendesk, and draft a personalized reply.

This is exactly what eesel AI is designed for. It’s an automation engine that looks and feels like an AI assistant. You can easily set up AI agents to:

• Connect to all your company knowledge, whether it's in Confluence, Google Docs, or past support tickets.

• Integrate directly with your help desk, like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom.

• Perform custom actions through API calls, like checking an order status, updating a customer record in your CRM, or creating a Jira ticket.

Here’s a quick table to make the distinction clear:

Feature	Microsoft Edge Copilot	GitHub Copilot	eesel AI
Primary Function	Information & Content	Code Generation	Workflow Automation
Takes Actions?	No, provides information.	Indirectly, by writing scripts.	Yes, via no-code setup.
Business System Integration	Limited to Microsoft 365	N/A	Deep (Zendesk, Slack, etc.)
Customization	Basic (tone of voice)	N/A	Full (prompts, actions, rules)

Pricing and plans compared

The pricing for these tools is another point of confusion, so let's clear it up.

Microsoft Edge Copilot:

• Free Version: This is the one you get in Edge and Windows. It gives you access to the standard AI models for search and content creation.

• Copilot Pro: For $20 per user per month, you get priority access during busy times, faster performance, and access to newer models like GPT-4 Turbo. You'll also need this plan to use Copilot inside Microsoft 365 apps like Word and Excel.

GitHub Copilot:

• Individual: This runs $10 per month or $100 per year.

• Business: At $19 per user per month, this adds company-wide policy management and better security.

• Enterprise: For $39 per user per month, you get more advanced features, like an AI chat that’s personalized to your company's private code.

And just to make it more interesting, businesses that want Copilot across Microsoft 365 need another license called "Copilot for Microsoft 365," which is $30 per user per month with an annual commitment. It can get complicated and expensive pretty quickly.

This is a big difference from tools designed for a specific business function. For instance, eesel AI's pricing isn’t based on paying for a license for every single employee. Instead, it’s based on the number of AI interactions you use, which makes your costs predictable and much easier to manage as your support team grows.

Choosing the right AI assistant for your team

So, decision time. How do you figure out which tool is right for you? It really just comes down to what you need to get done.

• Choose GitHub Copilot if: You're a developer or on a development team. Seriously, it's a no-brainer. It will make you faster and more efficient at writing code.

• Choose Microsoft Edge Copilot if: You're an individual looking for a general-purpose AI helper for research, summarizing articles, and drafting simple text.

• Consider a specialized platform if: Your team is stuck dealing with specific, repetitive tasks that are crying out for automation. This is where a tool built for a specific purpose will always beat a generalist assistant.

This is where eesel AI is the obvious choice for customer support, IT, and internal help desk teams. It isn't just about answering questions; it's about actually resolving issues from start to finish. It was built to overcome the limitations of general tools with a few key advantages:

• Go live in minutes: It’s a truly self-serve platform. You can sign up and build your first AI agent in the time it takes to get a demo scheduled with most of the big enterprise tools.

• Unify your real knowledge: It learns from the places where your team’s expertise actually lives, like past tickets, internal wikis in Confluence, and conversations in Slack, not just generic info from the web.

• Test with confidence: Its simulation mode lets you test your AI on thousands of your past tickets before you ever turn it on for customers. This gives you an accurate forecast of how it will perform, making the rollout completely risk-free.

Microsoft Edge Copilot for browsing, GitHub Copilot for building

When you boil it all down, the message is simple: Microsoft Edge Copilot is for browsing, and GitHub Copilot is for building. They’re both powerful in their own ways, but they are very different tools for very different jobs.

And while these two get a lot of headlines, the real future of business automation is in specialized AI agents that can connect deeply with your existing software and take meaningful action. For teams looking to move beyond simple chat and into true workflow automation for support, a purpose-built platform is the only way forward.

Ready to see what a specialized AI agent can do for your support team? Try eesel AI for free and you can build your first one in minutes.