Copilot free

It depends on which Copilot. Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft's chat assistant, has a free version: you use it with a Microsoft account from the web, the app or Windows itself. GitHub Copilot, the one that helps you code, also has a free tier with usage limits (checked in September 2026). And the Copilot that shows up inside Word, Excel or Outlook depends on the Microsoft 365 subscription you have.

That's confusion number one: Microsoft has called too many things Copilot, and each has its own terms. If you're searching for "free Copilot" to chat, the regular assistant is all you need; if you're a developer, GitHub Copilot is the one for you; if you want AI to help you inside your spreadsheets, check what your Microsoft 365 plan includes. For a small business the detail matters: before paying for anything extra, review what you already have and what happens to company documents when the AI reads them.

Copilot isn't one of the AIs I work with every day (mine is mainly Claude, with OpenAI, DeepSeek and a few Chinese AIs as backup), but it's in the comparison because lots of people have it installed on Windows without ever asking for it. What its free version offers and how it compares with the rest, I go through in "Can you work professionally with free AI tools?".