An honest look at Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT for small businesses already running on Microsoft 365
For the past year we have paid for three AI tools at once. Claude for writing and code. Gemini for quick research. Copilot because it came with the Microsoft licences we already sell and support. Every month the same question came up. Which one is actually earning its place?
If your business runs on Microsoft 365, the answer has quietly shifted. When we first wrote about what Microsoft Copilot actually does it was a promising add-on. It is no longer the weakest of the three. It is the one that knows your business, and that turns out to matter far more than which model writes the prettiest paragraph.
The difference is context, not cleverness
Claude and ChatGPT sit in a browser tab. They are brilliant, but they start every conversation knowing nothing about you. To get a useful answer you copy something in, explain the background, correct a few assumptions, then paste the result back where it needs to go.
Copilot works the other way round. It reads your Microsoft 365 content through Microsoft Graph, so it already has your emails, files, chats, calendar and meeting history. Ask it to draft a quote for a client and it can pull from the last proposal you sent, the email thread where the job was discussed, and the notes from the Teams call. No copying, no context setting, no tab hopping. We have broken down how Copilot works inside each Microsoft app if you want the detail.
That sounds like a small convenience. In daily use it is the whole thing. A general AI tool gives you a good answer about a subject. Copilot gives you a good answer about your business, in the app you are already in. It builds formulas and spots patterns when you are working in Excel, catches you up on what you missed when you are late to a Teams call and turns a Word document into a first draft deck when you are up against it in PowerPoint.
Your data stays inside your own four walls
This is the part that decides it for a lot of the businesses we look after, particularly anyone handling client records, health data or financial information.
Copilot inherits the permissions you already have. If someone cannot open a folder in SharePoint today, Copilot will not surface its contents for them tomorrow. Microsoft confirms that prompts, responses and data pulled through Microsoft Graph are not used to train the underlying models, and that Copilot falls under the same GDPR and EU Data Boundary commitments as the rest of your Microsoft 365 tenant.
Compare that with the reality in most small offices. Someone pastes a client contract into a free AI account they signed up for with a personal email. Nobody knows which account, which plan, or what happens to the text afterwards. There is no audit trail and no way to switch it off. Copilot removes that problem by giving people a sanctioned tool that already sits inside the systems you control.
One thing worth knowing if you are in the UK. Microsoft now offers Anthropic’s Claude models inside Copilot as a model choice, but that processing happens outside the EU Data Boundary. For UK and EU tenants the setting is controlled by your admin, so you can decide whether to allow it. That is exactly the kind of control you never get from a personal ChatGPT or Claude subscription.
What it costs, in plain numbers
Copilot has a reputation for being expensive. That reputation is based on old pricing. Microsoft split the product into two lanes, and small businesses sit in the cheaper one.
| Option | UK list price, per user per month | Who it suits |
| Copilot Chat | Included with most Microsoft 365 plans | Anyone wanting secure AI chat before committing to a paid seat |
| Business Standard with Copilot | Around £18.10 | Teams wanting one bundled subscription instead of two lines |
| Business Premium with Copilot | Around £24.60 | Anyone who wants the security stack and Copilot together |
Prices exclude VAT and Microsoft moves them regularly, so always check your admin centre or ask us before you budget. Base plan prices also rose on 1 July 2026, which changes the maths on renewal.
Look at the Business Premium bundle for a moment. You get Defender, Intune, sensitivity labels and the full Copilot experience for roughly what the Copilot add-on on its own used to cost. If you were already thinking about tightening up security, the AI comes close to free. It is the same argument we make for why Microsoft 365 suits small teams so well. You pay for one thing and get several.
Set that against £20 a month each for Claude Pro and ChatGPT Plus. Two personal subscriptions with no access to your files, no admin controls and no audit trail cost about the same as one properly governed Copilot seat.
Where Claude and ChatGPT still beat it
We are a Microsoft partner, so we will say this clearly. Copilot does not win everything.
- Deep code work. Claude is still our first choice for building WordPress plugins and working through a tricky bit of PHP. Nothing in Copilot has replaced that for us yet.
- Long, messy documents. Claude handles very large amounts of text in one go and holds the thread better across a fifty page report.
- Creative range and images. ChatGPT is more playful with tone, and its image generation and data analysis tools have no direct match.
- Working outside Microsoft. If your business lives in Google Workspace or a mix of platforms, Copilot’s biggest advantage disappears.
There is a twist though. Microsoft has opened Copilot up to other models, and Claude Opus now appears in the model picker in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Copilot Chat. So the gap on raw reasoning quality is narrowing from the inside. You get Anthropic’s models with your own business context attached, which is something you cannot do in Claude on its own.
The bit most businesses skip
Copilot inherits your permissions. That is a selling point when your permissions are tidy. It is a problem when they are not.
Most small businesses have a SharePoint site somebody shared with everyone in 2021 and forgot about. A payroll spreadsheet in a folder that should have been locked down. An old employee account still sitting there with access to everything. Nobody notices, because nobody goes looking. Copilot goes looking. Ask it about salaries and it will happily answer from anything the person asking is technically allowed to see.
Before you switch anyone on, spend a morning on the basics. Review who has access to what. Remove dormant accounts. Check your sharing links. Tidy up the file structure so people save things in the right place. This is worth doing whether you buy Copilot or not, and it is a good example of why Microsoft 365 works best with proper IT support behind it. Skipping this step is the single biggest reason Copilot rollouts disappoint.
How we would roll it out for a small team
Buying a licence for everyone on day one is how money gets wasted. The UK government ran a Copilot trial across roughly 20,000 people. It found an average saving of 26 minutes a day, which works out at around 13 working days a year. It also found that 17% of users saved no time at all. Both numbers matter, and they line up with what we see when we look at where the real productivity gains show up. The tool rewards the people who lean into it.
- Turn on Copilot Chat first. It comes with most plans, so your team can get comfortable at no extra cost.
- Sort your permissions and file structure before any paid seats go live.
- Buy three to five licences for the people drowning in email, meetings and spreadsheets. Admin, finance and management roles usually feel it first.
- Give everyone a proper hour of training. The gap between a great result and a useless one is almost always the prompt.
- Review after 90 days. Move licences to people who are using them, and be honest about the ones who are not.
Where we have landed
If your business already runs on Microsoft 365, Copilot should be your default AI tool. Not because it always writes the best answer, but because it writes an answer that already understands your business, inside the apps your team opens every morning, under rules you control.
Keep Claude or ChatGPT if there is a specific job they do better. We still do. Just stop treating a browser tab with no knowledge of your business as your main AI tool when there is a better option sitting inside the licence you already pay for.
Thinking about Copilot for your team? We are a Microsoft CSP partner based in Hull, and we look after Microsoft 365 for businesses across East Yorkshire. We will check your tenant is ready, get the licensing right, and make sure your team knows how to use it. Give us a call on 01482 275 200 or drop a note to hello@matthewtemple.co.uk and let’s get started.
