En bref. Microsoft vend cinq produits distincts appelés Copilot. Ce ne sont pas des paliers : ils ont des prix, des protections de données et des usages différents. La confusion coûte cher dans un cas précis — acheter Microsoft 365 Copilot pour toute l'entreprise, développeurs inclus, alors qu'un développeur a besoin de GitHub Copilot, facturé séparément. Cet article démêle les cinq et donne la règle : licenciez selon le travail réel, pas selon l'organigramme.
The naming is the problem
Microsoft has attached "Copilot" to at least five different products. Administrators and users routinely struggle to tell apart their capabilities and their data protections, and that confusion has a direct cost: organisations buy the wrong one, or buy one for people whose work it does not touch.
They are not tiers. Buying a more expensive one does not get you the others.
The five
Copilot (free consumer version). The chat experience at copilot.microsoft.com, and the one built into Windows. It has no connection to your organisation's data, no tenant grounding, and consumer terms.
This is the one that matters most for risk and costs nothing: it is where employees paste documents when nobody has given them an approved alternative. A company with no AI tooling does not have no AI usage — it has unmanaged AI usage.
Microsoft 365 Copilot. The one people mean by "Copilot." It works inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, grounded in your organisation's content through Microsoft Graph. It answers from your files, your email, your meetings — which is what makes it useful and what makes tenant readiness a prerequisite.
CA$28.50 per user per month, annual commitment, and it requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence underneath it. The Business tier is capped at 300 seats; above that it is the Enterprise tier at around CA$40.70. Bundled SKUs exist — Business Standard with Copilot at roughly CA$31.90 — and often cost less than buying the base plan and the add-on separately.
GitHub Copilot. Writes and reviews code in the editor. Around US$19 per user per month for Business, and it does not require a Microsoft 365 licence beneath it. Billing moved to a usage-based model in 2026, with credits on top of the seat.
This is a different product for a different job. It is not "Copilot for developers" in the sense of a variant — it is a separate purchase, usually made by a different budget holder, which is why it so often goes missing from a Copilot 365 rollout conversation.
Copilot Studio. For building custom agents against your own processes and data. Priced in credits, not seats — roughly CA$200 a month for a prepaid pack of 25,000, or about a cent per credit pay-as-you-go.
The cost model deserves attention: a scripted answer costs one credit; a reasoning-model answer costs a hundred. The same agent can run at CA$8 a month or CA$800 depending entirely on how it was built.
Security Copilot. For security operations — incident investigation, hunting, analysis. Priced separately again, and aimed at teams with a security function. For most organisations this list is meant for, it is not the starting point.
The expensive confusion
The failure mode is specific and common: a blanket Microsoft 365 Copilot purchase across the whole company, including the engineering team.
A developer given Microsoft 365 Copilot has been given a tool for drafting documents and summarising meetings. It does not help them write code. GitHub Copilot does — and it is a separate line item that nobody raised, because the conversation was about "rolling out Copilot" as though there were one thing to roll out.
The result is a team paying CA$28.50 per developer per month for a tool those developers do not open, while the tool that would have helped them goes unbought.
Match the tool to the work
| What the person does all day | What they need |
|---|---|
| Documents, email, spreadsheets, decks, meetings | Microsoft 365 Copilot |
| Writes or reviews code | GitHub Copilot |
| Needs a custom agent for a specific process | Copilot Studio |
| Runs security operations | Security Copilot |
| None of the above, most days | Probably nothing yet |
Two notes on reading that table.
Some people need two. A technical lead who writes code in the morning and a board paper in the afternoon genuinely needs both, and that is a real CA$50-ish per month. Fine — it is a decision rather than an accident.
The last row is a real answer. Not everyone benefits. Someone whose work is a line-of-business system, a phone and a calendar is not going to find Microsoft 365 Copilot useful, and giving them one is how adoption figures end up where they are.
Before any of them, the free one
The product to have a position on first is the one you are not paying for.
If staff have no approved AI tool, some of them are using the consumer version, and company documents are being pasted into an interface with consumer terms and no tenant boundary. That is not a hypothetical — it is the default state of most organisations before a rollout.
Which reframes the licensing decision. It is not "should we spend money on AI." It is "AI is already in use here, unmanaged — what do we approve, for whom, and under what settings."
In short
Five products, one name, and they are not tiers. Microsoft 365 Copilot for people working in documents. GitHub Copilot for people writing code. Studio when you need an agent. Security Copilot for a security team.
The question is never "which tier of Copilot." It is "what does this person actually do all day" — and the free consumer version is the one to have an answer about before you buy any of the others.
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