Overview
Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's consumer AI assistant at copilot.microsoft.com, with a free version subject to capacity limits. Microsoft 365 Personal, Family and Premium subscriptions add Copilot inside the desktop Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook apps, with higher usage. Businesses buy Microsoft 365 Copilot separately as an add-on or as part of a business bundle.
Label: Vendor-described — Captured from the vendor's own materials. Not independently verified.
Best for
- Individuals wanting a free general-purpose AI chat assistant
- Microsoft 365 Personal/Family subscribers who want AI inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint
Key features
- AI chat for questions, writing, brainstorming and summaries
- Image creation when signed in with a personal account
- Voice interactions and saved chat history when signed in
- Built into Microsoft Edge and available on Windows and macOS
- Copilot in desktop Office apps via Microsoft 365 individual plans
- Researcher and Analyst agents with Microsoft 365 Premium
What it does
- Free AI chat assistant
- Copilot in desktop Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook (Microsoft 365 plans)
- Chat and image usage on paid plans
- Agentic AI features (Premium and Pro tiers)
Use cases
Not mapped to a use case yet.
Drawbacks & cautions
- Free Copilot depends on available capacity and has limits
- In Family and Premium, Copilot is available only to the subscription owner
- The business Copilot add-on requires a separate qualifying Microsoft 365 plan
What users say
Feedback on the consumer Copilot is thin and mixed: a third-party review summarizing G2 and Trustpilot comments and a few Hacker News comments praise its convenience inside Windows and Edge, while complaints focus on confusing paid plans, limited memory and refusals.
What people like
- Handy to have built into the Windows taskbar and Edge sidebar for quick lookups zemith.com
- Mobile apps give free access to a capable modern language model hn.algolia.com
Common complaints
- Confusing plan structure; paid Copilot features in Office also require a Microsoft 365 subscription zemith.com
- Short memory in long chats and canned refusals frustrate some users zemith.com
- Some dislike it being preinstalled on Windows and using system resources hn.algolia.com
Scores are shown as each site published them on the date checked. They come from those sites' reviewers, not from us, and they never affect our rankings. Ratings based on fewer than 10 reviews are left out. The summaries are our own words, gathered Oct 22, 2026; follow the links to read the reviews.
Alternatives
- ChatGPT — General-purpose AI chat assistant for writing, research, analysis, images and coding
- Claude — AI assistant for writing, analysis, research and coding, with Claude Code included on paid plans
- Google Gemini — Google's AI assistant for chat, research, images and video, built into Google apps
- Microsoft 365 Copilot — AI assistant add-on for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams grounded in work data
Evidence
| Fact | Label | Source | Observed |
|---|---|---|---|
| pricing | Vendor-described | www.microsoft.com | Oct 17, 2026 |
| pricing | Vendor-described | www.microsoft.com | Oct 17, 2026 |
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