Kortix vs Microsoft Copilot: the open-source comparison

What Microsoft Copilot is

Microsoft Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant for work, as an add-on to Microsoft 365 (Microsoft's Copilot page). Copilot Chat comes with eligible Microsoft 365 plans at no additional cost and grounds answers in web data. The paid tier, Microsoft 365 Copilot, adds grounding in company content through Microsoft Graph and Work IQ, and puts Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Microsoft prices that tier at $30 per user per month, paid yearly on an annual commitment, on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan (Microsoft's enterprise pricing page, checked October 2026).

The product runs on Microsoft's estate, which Microsoft describes as the commercial cloud and select sovereign cloud environments. Models are Microsoft's call: the pricing table lists the latest OpenAI models, and Auto weighs accuracy, speed and cost to pick one per request. For systems outside Microsoft 365, Microsoft sells Copilot Studio, a separate platform for building custom agents, which reaches other software through more than 1,500 prebuilt connectors and MCP servers (Microsoft's Copilot Studio page).

What Kortix is

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. A session gets its own isolated sandbox, on its own branch, and finished work reaches the default branch only through a change request a person reviews and approves, so nothing merges itself.

The configuration reads as files: agents and skills are markdown, memory is files that accumulate, and kortix.yaml declares the machine image, the connectors and the triggers. You can grep the whole company, diff any change, and roll any part of it back. Kortix runs on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network, and self-hosting is free.

The differences that decide it

Ownership comes first. Copilot's configuration lives in Microsoft's products, built with Agent Builder and managed through Copilot Studio inside Microsoft's tooling. Kortix's configuration is a git repo you clone, fork and audit, because the code is open source.

Reach differs in shape. Microsoft Graph gives Copilot depth inside Microsoft 365, and Copilot Studio adds 1,500+ prebuilt connectors for external systems. Kortix reaches 3,000+ apps in a click, plus MCP, OpenAPI, GraphQL and raw HTTP, and connector credentials are brokered server-side so they never enter the machine.

Permissions are governed differently. Copilot scopes access by the signed-in user's permissions, with Enterprise Data Protection included across its tiers. Kortix treats agents as principals in their own right: per-resource permissions for people and agents, roles, groups and an audit trail, with each tool call set to allow, ask or block, down to the arguments it was given. Approval gates you set. Off until you set them.

Where work lands is the governance difference. Copilot's output appears in the Microsoft 365 apps people already use. Kortix session work lands on main as a change request you read as a diff first. Configuration follows the same split: a Kortix agent is agents/<name>.md (behavior) plus an agents.<name> block in kortix.yaml (governance), versioned like code, while Copilot agents are built and managed in Microsoft's interfaces.

The decision rule

If the agents should work across systems your company owns, with the configuration in your repo and a review gate before anything lands, run Kortix. It is open source, it self-hosts free, it runs any model on your keys, and every change lands through a change request a person approves. Microsoft Copilot is built for work inside Microsoft 365, per seat, on Microsoft's cloud; if your whole workday happens in Office documents and Outlook, the included Copilot Chat tier covers the chat part without a new system to run. Where you want that boundary to sit is the decision: inside one vendor's estate, or in the repo you own. Teams weighing more options can read the open-source Copilot alternatives guide.