Assessing the competitors of Copilot for Microsoft 365
There are numerous generative AI tools that focus on enhancing user productivity, so organizations should survey the market to evaluate which product they should deploy and use.
Many vendors have generative AI products, but Microsoft has a distinct advantage with the ability to integrate its AI assistant -- Microsoft Copilot -- into its variety of business technologies.
However, as with any business technology purchase, organizations should review the variety of generative AI (GenAI) technologies on the market that could improve productivity and evaluate them against their internal needs.
What is Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365?
Microsoft Copilot is a GenAI tool that focuses on supporting users within a wide range of Microsoft business and end-user technologies via a virtual assistant that answers user prompts. Perhaps the most significant integration that Copilot offers is with the Microsoft 365 productivity suite.
AI-generated information on its own is not generally presentable for a final document or project in any given situation. Users that work with such content must fact-check, edit, analyze and format this content properly before moving forward with it. The Microsoft Copilot dialog box even displays a warning to this effect, stating "AI generated content may be incorrect."
Analyzing the competitors of Copilot for Microsoft 365
While Copilot's integration with Office is a powerful time saver, there are other products and tools that may be just as valuable to an organization's productivity. For instance, voice-to-text capability for speech recognition, decision intelligence and machine learning may be better served from some organizations' use cases of AI.
The Microsoft Copilot dialog box even displays a warning to this effect, stating 'AI generated content may be incorrect.'
This article will focus on a short list of competitors that can offer competing services. While there are many products that incorporate GenAI, not all of them can match the scope of Copilot's services. This analysis is based on a G2 aggregation of products and user reviews, and to narrow the list down the author compared several other lists to see which products were consistently present. Additionally, the author deemed Google Gemini a worthy exception to add to the list of competitors, even though it functions best within a Google Workspace environment. The products in this list are organized in alphabetical order.
ChatGPT
Based on market research of GenAI tools in the enterprise, ChatGPT seems to be where many organizations start. Reviews from actual customers provided interesting insights to useful features. These features include language processing -- meaning it understands what you ask, making it easy to create prompts. This makes ChatGPT easy to use for beginners. It also offers favorable tool integration with products such as Slack, Guru and Shopify. ChatGPT Handles diverse file types and supports all web browsers as well.
Some customers' challenges with this service included ChatGPT failing to process advanced, complex prompts and slow customer support. G2 also included many complaints about ChatGPT returning outdated or inaccurate information -- though it is by no means the only GenAI tool with this issue.
ChatGPT has a free version with daily limits. GPTPlus costs $20 per month, and it provides about five times more capacity. There is also ChatGPT Team for SMBs and an Enterprise version for larger organizations that require communication with a sales representative for a quote.
Google Gemini
While Gemini is conspicuously absent from many of the aggregated competitor lists, this service is perhaps the most analogous competitor to Copilot for Microsoft 365. While Copilot integrates directly with the Microsoft 365 suite, Gemini integrates directly with the Google Workspace productivity suite. Gemini works across many information sources including text, code, audio, image and video. There are four different models:
Gemini Ultra. This version has superior performance on complex tasks such as mathematical models.
Gemini Pro. This option provides more value for SMBs and easily scales across many tasks.
Gemini Flash. This model is focused on speed and efficiency in processing larger files and workloads.
Gemini Nano. This edition is best for on-device tasks.
Gemini is available to anyone in the U.S. over age 13 and over age 18 in certain other countries, but users need a personal Google Account -- meaning it is self-managed -- or a Google Workspace account that has Gemini Apps enabled. For users over age 18, there is a Google One AI Premium Plan that includes Gemini in Gmail, Docs and other productivity applications, 2 TB of storage and additional features too numerous to list. This version is free for the first month and $19.99 per month after. There is also a pay-as-you-go model that charges per request and inquiry, and by API usage.
IBM Watson Studio
IBM Watson Studio and data platform accepts open source, third-party models or even a custom model, making it flexible enough to work with hybrid multi-cloud environments. IBM also describes its open source Granite Model as its "flagship brand of open large language model (LLM) foundation models spanning multiple modalities."
One customer who wrote a review on G2 uses the tool for customer data analysis and predictive analytics. It is particularly useful for customer data analytics generated by Watson and in fraud detection and management. Helpful features include natural language understanding, fast answers and easy integration with business processes.
One customer felt it was superior to ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. However, several customers complained about the lack of document scanning, training and documentation in general. Others noted the limited local language support and need for an improved UI. And customers indicated that IBM support is often slow and not "knowledgeable."
There are three pricing plans for this product: Lite -- which is free -- Plus and Enterprise.
Simplified
Simplified is a less popular product than the others on this list, but it was listed in numerous Copilot competitor reviews as often as ChatGPT and IBM. One feature Simplified has that other big names do not is integrated image enhancement and the ability to generate high quality images along with video and text. This makes it a popular tool for content writers, bloggers and marketing professionals.
Simplified's customers who wrote G2 reviews like its user-friendly interface that works for beginners and can perform complex tasks for advanced users. They also point to its accurate content creation with good contextual understanding as a major benefit. Besides image enhancement, Simplified has strong text generation and data analysis capabilities. One of the most popular features is a plethora of designed templates which makes content creation quick and easy.
Some of the challenges that customers found with the Simplified tool include frequent repetition of answers, oversimplifying of results, limited customization options and difficulty with dragging and dropping a large number of photos.
Simplified has a free version but also features a mid-range plan called Simplified One for $29.99 per month or $24 per month with an annual license discount, and Enterprise, which requires contact with the sales department for an estimate.
Gary Olsen has worked in the IT industry since 1983 and holds a Master of Science in computer-aided manufacturing from Brigham Young University. He was on Microsoft's Windows 2000 beta support team for Active Directory from 1998 to 2000 and has written two books on Active Directory and numerous technical articles for magazines and websites.
