Open-Source Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Cowork Alternatives

Kortix is the open-source AI Management System: your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector in one platform — any model, your keys, self-hosted or managed cloud. It is the leading open-source alternative to Microsoft Copilot Cowork, and it is the recommendation on this page. If you want to own your agent platform instead of renting it from Microsoft, start with Kortix; the comparison below shows why.

Two Microsoft products, one confusing name

People searching for a "Microsoft 365 Copilot alternative" usually mean one of two different Microsoft products. They are not the same thing, and the right alternative depends on which one you mean.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the AI assistant embedded in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. It drafts, summarizes, and answers questions inside Office apps, grounded in your work by Work IQ. Microsoft sells it as a per-user licence; the Microsoft 365 Copilot Business plan starts from $18 per user per month on annual billing (Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing). This is an assistant, not an autonomous worker.

Microsoft Copilot Cowork is the autonomous-worker layer. Microsoft describes it as "an agentic system designed for complex, long-running, multi-tool tasks": you describe an outcome, Cowork plans the steps, picks skills and apps, pauses for your approval at checkpoints, and returns finished artifacts — a deck, a report, an email, an update (Microsoft Copilot Cowork). Cowork reached general availability in June 2026 and is billed on usage through Copilot Credits on top of your Microsoft 365 Copilot licence (Microsoft 365 Blog).

Work IQ is Microsoft's workplace intelligence layer that connects data, context, and tools across Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. It is what grounds both Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Cowork (Microsoft 365 Copilot).

The overlap that matters here is Copilot Cowork, not the Office assistant. Copilot Cowork is the part of Microsoft's stack that competes with an open-source AI Management System like Kortix, because both manage autonomous agents across your company's tools. The rest of this page compares Kortix against Copilot Cowork and the open-source field.

The open-source field: licence, self-hosting, and agent model

Kortix is open source (Elastic License 2.0) — self-host, read and modify the code. The table compares Kortix against Microsoft Copilot Cowork and four open-source agent and coworker projects, using each project's own repo or product page. Star counts and release versions are as of September 29, 2026.

Every open-source project in the table lets you self-host and bring your own model. Microsoft Copilot Cowork is the only entry that is closed and cloud-only. The difference between Kortix and the other open-source tools is what they are for: Eigent, OpenClaw, OpenWorker, and Hermes Agent are personal or desktop agents and messengers, while Kortix is a company-wide agent management system.

Why Kortix is the recommendation

Kortix wins on six things an agent-management platform needs: ownership, model choice, connectors, an agent harness, isolated machines, and a human gate on every change.

• The company is one git repo. Agents, skills, memory, connector config, and triggers are files you own — grep the whole company, diff any change, roll it back. In Copilot Cowork your configuration lives inside Microsoft's product, not in a repo you control (Kortix).
• Any model, your keys. Kortix is model-agnostic: Claude, OpenAI, Google Gemini, or your own OpenAI-compatible endpoint, chosen per agent, per session, or per message. Copilot Cowork runs Microsoft-hosted models and picks the model for you (Kortix docs).
• 3,000+ connectors. Wire up Slack, tickets, CRM, billing, and code once, then scope which agent may touch which one — plus any MCP, OpenAPI, GraphQL, or HTTP API. Connector credentials are brokered server-side and never enter the machine (Kortix).
• A real agent harness. Powered by OpenCode: planning, tool use, and multi-step runs that finish, with per-tool permissions down to a single command (Kortix on GitHub).
• Every session gets its own computer. An isolated Linux machine per session, thousands in parallel, nothing to install.
• One gate to land work. Agents start from web, Slack, Teams, email, CLI, or API — or from cron and webhooks with nobody asking. The work lands as a change request a human reads as a diff. Copilot Cowork pauses at checkpoints, but you cannot host it, cannot change its model, and cannot own the platform it runs on.

How to pick: self-host vs cloud, model control, and data ownership

• Self-host or cloud? If agent work must run on your own infrastructure — your VPC, your on-prem network, or a laptop — pick Kortix. Copilot Cowork is Microsoft cloud only. Eigent, OpenClaw, OpenWorker, and Hermes Agent also self-host, but as personal or single-tenant desktop tools rather than a company system.
• Model flexibility. If you need to switch models, run local models, or keep your own API keys, Kortix supports any model with your keys. Copilot Cowork uses Microsoft-hosted models and bills you for the model it selects per task.
• Data ownership. With Kortix, the entire company — agents, skills, memory, connector config — is one git repo you own. With Copilot Cowork, the same state lives in Microsoft's tenant, under Microsoft's security model, and you cannot take it elsewhere.
• M365-native vs open. If your entire stack is Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Dynamics 365 and you will never self-host, Copilot Cowork is the native fit. If you want to own the platform, run any model with your keys, and land agent work as reviewable diffs, Kortix is the answer.

Get started with open-source Kortix at kortix.com, read the code at Kortix on GitHub, or install it with curl -fsSL https://kortix.com/install | bash. For the other lanes in this family, see the GitHub Copilot alternatives page (coding) and the Copilot Studio alternatives page (agent builders).

Frequently asked questions