Microsoft Copilot

Copilot's unfair advantage is placement. It ships with Windows, sits in Edge, and lives inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook — no rival gets to draft your document in the document. The free tier is better than it gets credit for: frontier OpenAI models plus Microsoft's own MAI models, voice conversations, vision, and image generation without paying anything. And for the huge population already subscribed to Microsoft 365, Copilot arrives as a feature of something they were buying anyway, with Personal at $9.99/mo bundling Office apps and 1TB of OneDrive alongside AI credits.

The catch is that Microsoft's packaging works against it. In two years the consumer story went from free Copilot, to Copilot Pro, to Copilot-in-Microsoft-365, to Microsoft 365 Premium — and the AI-credit metering on consumer plans means the Office integration you paid for can still tell you you're out of credits. Output quality is solid but rarely the best: on long creative work and coding, ChatGPT and Claude tend to win despite the shared model lineage, and Copilot refuses or hedges more often than either. The 1.8 Trustpilot score is mostly consumer frustration with exactly that gap between promise and delivery.

The business product is a different calculation. At $30/user/month on top of an existing Microsoft 365 plan, Microsoft 365 Copilot is expensive — but it is also the only assistant that can answer 'what did I miss in yesterday's meeting?' from your actual tenant with enterprise data protection. G2 and Capterra reviewers land around 4.5 because for meeting recaps, email triage, and first-draft documents, it demonstrably pays for itself in saved hours.

Verdict: if your life runs on Microsoft 365, Copilot is the obvious pick and the free tier is a no-brainer starting point. If you're not in the ecosystem, skip the bundle math — ChatGPT or Gemini are cleaner standalone choices.