Copilot or Copilot Business: two contracts, and an open-source third

What the word Business adds to the same assistant

Microsoft Copilot is the assistant that drafts, summarizes and answers inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Microsoft Copilot Business is that same assistant, sold to smaller companies as an add-on to a Microsoft 365 Business plan, on an annual commitment, capped at 300 people per tenant (Microsoft's Copilot Business FAQ). Microsoft says the two deliver the same capabilities. The differences land on the invoice and in the admin center.

Someone with administrator rights assigns the subscription person by person in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and the same person removes it. The commitment runs for a year, so the renewal date is set by the contract rather than by headcount. Microsoft's business pricing page lists the add-on at $18 per person per month paid yearly as a promotion running to 31 December 2026, against $21 at the standard rate (Microsoft, checked October 2026).

One purchase rule does move this quarter. The offers that need a qualifying base subscription have carried "(add-on)" in their names since 16 October 2026, and they reach end of sale in the Cloud Solution Provider program on 1 December 2026. New offers arrive the same day without the base-plan requirement, on their own product and SKU identifiers and at the same prices (Partner Center). From December, then, a company can buy Copilot Business without owning Microsoft 365 first. What it still cannot buy is the tenant, the administration or the code.

What Business leaves alone

Three things survive the upgrade. The assistant behaves the same way in the same applications. Grounding still runs through the company's own mail, files and meetings, scoped by the permissions each person already holds, and Microsoft states that Copilot follows the organization's existing Microsoft 365 security settings. And the second meter stays on the invoice.

That meter is the part a budget should read twice. Microsoft's pricing page separates everyday AI, included with the subscription, from advanced work billed as it is used. No contract clause fixes what that usage comes to: a subscription signed through a Cloud Solution Provider after 1 December 2026 arrives with usage billing already on, and with an allowance Microsoft presets for each person that an administrator can change (Partner Center). The seat price holds and a consumption line appears beside it.

The question the contract cannot answer is what the company keeps. Copilot's behavior is Microsoft's to change, and the record of what it did sits inside a service the company rents. A team can edit an agent's instructions and connectors through the studio or the admin center. Nobody on that team can open the software that runs the agent, fork it, or carry the working setup to another host when a price, a roadmap or a market decision moves.

The governance question to answer before the invoice

Ask who can stop an agent, and where the record of what it did is kept. Those two answers decide more about a rollout than any feature matrix, and they are the answers a small company most often skips.

Kortix answers both in the repository. Per-resource permissions for people and agents. Roles, groups, and an audit trail. Every action is recorded. Reading, exporting and streaming the audit log depend on the plan.

Approval gates you set. Off until you set them. A connector rule can allow a call, hold it until a person approves, or block it outright, and the rule is a line in kortix.yaml, under policies:, matched against the connector call it names. A project policy sets one default; a rule tightens it for a single connector action. An administrator who wants an agent to stop sending mail changes the rule in the file that declares it.

Running the layer on a system the company owns

In Kortix, the agent layer is a repository. Agents, skills, company memory, connectors and their permissions live in one git repo the company owns, so the working setup travels with the company. A company that wants the agent layer inside its own network has a path. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free.

The concession is real, and it belongs in the comparison. A company whose work already happens in Word and Outlook pays less per person and administers less by staying with Microsoft. Copilot arrives already grounded in the tenant, inside permissions people hold, with nothing to host or patch. For that company, buying Business and stopping there is a defensible decision.

Ownership earns its price at the edges. It shows up when a price changes twice in one year, when a compliance team asks to read the instructions that govern an agent, or when a company wants the same agents to outlive a vendor relationship. In Kortix that answer is a repository: readable, diffable and portable.

Two related questions carry the rest of the decision. Copilot and Copilot Studio answer the seat-or-meter half of it. Managing a Copilot agent fleet covers the administration that begins once the agent count outgrows the people deploying them. The contract questions behind the July 2026 price promotion sit in the Copilot add-on guide, and self-hosting covers what running the stack yourself involves.