AI Use Cases

Chat & research · by Microsoft

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft's assistant, free on the web and Windows, and embedded in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

+ Works inside the Office apps you already use, drafting Outlook replies, summarizing Teams meetings and turning Word docs into PowerPoint decks.
− Results inside Excel and PowerPoint are often shallow compared with the standalone chat, which makes the $30 business seat hard to justify.

Free tierCopilot Pro $20/mo; Microsoft 365 Copilot $30/user/mowebwindowsmaciosandroid

Open Microsoft Copilot ↗ best for: Microsoft 365 organizations

Evidence

rank #59 of 257
25evidence score / 100
3Hacker News stories, 30d · query "Microsoft Copilot"
0mentions in our release feed, 30d
–days since last activity

Microsoft Copilot alternatives

All 15 alternatives →
1
Claude Free tier
Anthropic's chat assistant known for careful long-form writing, large context windows and Projects for working over document sets.

+ Produces natural, editable prose and follows nuanced instructions over very long documents better than most rivals.
− Pro usage limits can run out mid-session on long conversations, and it has no built-in image generation.

Pro $20/mo, Max from $100/mowebmacwindowsiosandroidapi
96▲ 7
evidence / 100
2
ChatGPT Free tier
OpenAI's general-purpose chat assistant with web browsing, file analysis, image generation and voice.

+ The broadest feature set in one place: Deep Research, code-executing data analysis on uploaded spreadsheets, voice mode and a huge library of custom GPTs.
− Free and Plus tiers hit message caps on the best models at busy times, and answers can be confidently wrong without citations unless you ask it to search.

Plus $20/mo, Pro $200/mowebmacwindowsiosandroidapi
83▲ 27
evidence / 100
3
Gemini Free tier
Google's assistant with Deep Research reports, Gmail/Docs/Drive integration and YouTube video understanding.

+ Deep Research produces long cited reports from dozens of sources, and it reads your Gmail, Drive and Calendar directly when you allow it.
− Quality swings between Flash and Pro models, and it refuses or hedges on some topics more than competitors.

Google AI Pro $19.99/mowebiosandroidapi
77▲ 33
evidence / 100
4
Perplexity Free tier
An answer engine that searches the web and returns a synthesized reply with inline citations.

+ Every answer comes with clickable sources, and Pro lets you switch between frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
− Citations sometimes do not actually support the sentence they are attached to, so you still have to click through for anything important.

Pro $20/mowebmacwindowsiosandroidapi
58▲ 37
evidence / 100
5
Meta AI Free
Meta's free Llama-based assistant built into WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Facebook and a standalone app.

+ Completely free and already inside WhatsApp and Instagram, so there is nothing to install or pay for.
− Weaker at reasoning and long documents than paid assistants, cannot be removed from WhatsApp, and is unavailable or limited in some regions.

Freewebiosandroid
51▲ 38
evidence / 100