Open-source Microsoft Copilot alternatives for teams, compared

What makes an alternative work for a team

An open-source Copilot alternative is agent software whose code is published and auditable, running on machines your team controls. Onyx's published comparison records Microsoft 365 Copilot with no self-host option, at $21 to $30 per user plus a required Microsoft 365 subscription (checked October 2026). That is the deal for teams that stay inside the Microsoft stack. The open-source field is the other deal: software you own.

Most roundups rank these tools for one person at one desk. A company rollout hits requirements a single user never meets, and they are worth naming before the field:

1. One shared instance. Every person works in the same deployment, with roles, groups and sign-on your IT team administers.
2. Reach into your tools. The system connects to your stack, wherever it runs.
3. Company knowledge under permissions. Answers respect who may see what, and context accumulates as shared memory.
4. Finished work with review. Output lands somewhere a person can inspect and merge it.

Self-hosting alone clears none of these. It gets the software inside your walls; the four tests decide whether a company can run on it.

The field, project by project

Kortix is the recommendation for a company-level system. Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System: your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector in one git repo you own, with the agents working on real cloud computers. The repo is Kortix on GitHub, with 20,000+ GitHub stars (October 2026). Isolation is per task: One isolated sandbox per session. Each session has its own isolated machine and branch. Thousands of agents in parallel on one config, each on its own cloud computer. Session work reaches main through a change request. Merge is default-deny for agents. Reach is wide: 3,000+ apps in a click, plus MCP, OpenAPI, Postman, GraphQL and raw HTTP, and connector credentials are brokered server-side and never enter the machine. The controls a security review asks about live in the same repo: per-resource permissions for people and agents, roles, groups, and an audit trail, SAML 2.0 single sign-on and SCIM 2.0, approval gates you set (off until you set them), and secrets encrypted at rest with a key per project. SOC 2 Type I is held; SOC 2 Type II is in progress. People reach it where they already work: Slack and Microsoft Teams are live. Models stay yours: any model provider with your own keys, or the ChatGPT plan you already pay for. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free. The cloud plan is $40/seat/month with 2,500 pooled credits per seat, and the free tier includes 200 credits each month for sandbox compute and 1 project (Kortix pricing, checked October 2026).

Onyx pitches itself as the open-source Microsoft Copilot alternative, and its pitch is answers: an index over 40+ enterprise connectors that sync continuously, permission-aware search and chat, deep research reports, and agents that take actions in external applications. Deployment runs on Docker, Kubernetes or Helm, with a one-line install script for a first run. SSO runs over Google OAuth or SAML, with SCIM provisioning and role-based access control. The community edition is free, and the managed cloud is $20 per user per month (checked October 2026). The job Onyx describes for itself is the knowledge layer for a team and its AI agents, and that is the job to hire it for.

Open WebUI is a self-hosted AI platform built to run entirely offline: Ollama alongside any OpenAI-compatible API, granular role-based access with user groups, OAuth sign-on and SCIM 2.0 provisioning, agents that can get a terminal inside the chat, and knowledge bases fed by Google Drive and OneDrive pickers or by a companion project that syncs 45+ sources. Teams run it as the front door to every model they pay for. Two company-scale caveats come from its own materials: its published code terms keep the Open WebUI branding in deployments beyond fifty people unless the project grants permission, and the per-user isolated agent terminals sit on the enterprise plan.

n8n describes itself as fair-code, a workflow automation platform with native AI capabilities: a visual canvas beside custom code, 1,500+ integrations, and multi-step AI workflows with human approvals, observability, role-based access and audit trails. Fair-code is the project's own term for code you can see and self-host on terms the project sets. As a Copilot substitute it fits the repeatable job: the same steps, in the same order, every run. Kortix's own README points fixed-flowchart jobs to n8n.

LibreChat is the shared chat front end: an open-source interface over Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, AWS Bedrock and OpenAI-compatible endpoints, with agents, MCP tools and skills, multi-user sign-in through OAuth2, LDAP or email, and an admin panel for roles and groups. The project calls itself completely open-source and built in public. Teams that hold several model subscriptions often run it as the one window over all of them.

Which one fits your team

The job decides. Answers over company knowledge, permission-aware and indexed across your stack, is Onyx's job. One front door to every model a team already pays for is Open WebUI or LibreChat. Flows that repeat on a schedule, with approvals where they matter, is n8n. A system where agents work on their own cloud computers, hold the company's memory, and land finished work as reviewed changes is Kortix, and the four tests on this page are its design brief.

If the comparison you need is against Microsoft's product directly, the Kortix vs Copilot page works through it side by side. If the question is Microsoft's agent builder, the Copilot Studio alternatives page covers that. When the shortlist settles, Kortix installs from one command:

curl -fsSL https://kortix.com/install | bashkortix initkortix ship