The short answer
Microsoft Copilot vs Claude: pick Microsoft 365 Copilot if your company runs on Outlook, Teams and SharePoint and buys licences, because it works from your mail, meetings and files under enterprise data protection. Pick Claude, Anthropic's assistant on Claude Opus 5.5 since 22 September 2026, for writing, financial models, coding and finished documents. The two overlap: Copilot in PowerPoint uses Sonnet 5.5, and the Claude for Microsoft 365 add-ins bring Claude into Excel, PowerPoint and Word on paid plans.
| Microsoft Copilot | Claude | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Microsoft, United States | Anthropic, United States |
| Free plan | Copilot Free: chat, image creation and file uploads, subject to capacity | Sonnet and Haiku, web search, files, connectors, Docs, Slides and Design; limits every 5 hours and every week |
| Personal paid plans | Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium and Pro | Pro, Max and Ultra |
| Models | Not named for personal plans; Auto routing at work; Sonnet 5.5 in PowerPoint | Claude Opus 5.5 (paid), Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 (all plans), Fable 5.1 |
| Work plans | Copilot Chat free with enterprise data protection; Microsoft 365 Copilot Business and Microsoft 365 Copilot licences | Team (2 to 150 users) and Enterprise |
| Inside Word, Excel and PowerPoint | Built in with a licence or a personal Microsoft 365 plan | Claude for Microsoft 365 add-ins on paid plans; Outlook in beta |
| Reads your company mail and files | Yes, through Microsoft Graph with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence | Through the Microsoft 365 connector after admin consent |
| Hand over whole tasks | Copilot Cowork; Autopilot in Frontier | Cowork in every conversation (rolling out on paid plans); scheduled tasks |
| Personal data and training | No training setting documented in the updated app | Opt out in Settings > Privacy > Help Improve our AI models |
| Our pick for | Microsoft 365 companies, meetings and email | Writing, models, coding and finished files |
Copilot vs Claude: the verdict
Pick Microsoft 365 Copilot if your company runs on Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Excel and will pay for Copilot licences. It reads the mail, meetings and files you already have permission to see, it runs under Microsoft's enterprise data protection, and nothing else on this page reaches that deep into a Microsoft 365 tenant. Pick Claude, Anthropic's assistant, for almost everything else: writing that carries your name, long documents, coding, and whole tasks that end in a finished file. Claude runs on Claude Opus 5.5 (released 22 September 2026) on paid plans, and on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Haiku 5.5 on every plan including Free.
The twist in this comparison is that the two products overlap more every month. Microsoft offers Claude models inside its own Copilot: its Microsoft Learn page lists Microsoft Copilot, Researcher, Copilot Studio, Power Platform and Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps, and in Researcher and Edit with Copilot users can select Claude. Since October 2026 Copilot in PowerPoint uses Sonnet 5.5. In the other direction, Anthropic sells Claude for Microsoft 365, a set of add-ins that put Claude inside Excel, PowerPoint and Word (generally available on paid Claude plans since 7 May 2026) and Outlook (in beta). So the real question is less "which model" and more "which product, on which account, with which data".
In one line: Copilot for work that lives in your company's Microsoft 365, Claude for work that needs careful thinking and a finished result. Many teams end up using both, and that is a sensible outcome rather than a failure to decide.
Which Copilot and which Claude are you comparing?
Both names cover several products. Find your row before you read the verdicts below.
| Microsoft Copilot | Claude | |
|---|---|---|
| Personal, free | Copilot Free: chat, image creation and file uploads, subject to capacity and limits | Claude Free: Sonnet and Haiku, web search, files, memory, connectors, Claude Docs, Slides and Design, up to 5 Projects |
| Personal, paid | Microsoft 365 Personal, Family, Premium and Pro, which add Copilot in the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook desktop apps | Pro, Max and Ultra (Ultra was called Max 20x and gives 10 times Pro's weekly usage) |
| Free for work accounts | Microsoft Copilot Chat with enterprise data protection for Microsoft Entra work or school accounts | No free business tier; Team starts at 2 users |
| Paid for work | Microsoft 365 Copilot Business and Microsoft 365 Copilot licences | Team (2 to 150 users) and Enterprise |
| Inside Office apps | Built in, with a Copilot licence or a personal Microsoft 365 plan | Claude for Microsoft 365 add-ins on paid plans, installed from Microsoft AppSource |
Two practical notes. On Microsoft 365 Family, the Copilot features work only for the subscription owner, not for the other members. And Copilot has been through a big reshuffle: since 18 August 2026 one Copilot app covers personal and work accounts (kept separate, with no data flowing between them), and Microsoft retired Deep Research and Podcasts in the Copilot app on that date and did not carry Group Chat threads forward. If you used the old app, Microsoft says to sign in to the updated app by 31 December 2026 to keep your eligible chats.
Email, meetings and company files: Microsoft 365 Copilot wins
This is Copilot's home ground. With a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, it answers from your organisation's mail, chats, meetings and files through Microsoft Graph, respecting the permissions you already have. Teams produces intelligent meeting recaps, which since October 2026 work without saving a transcript. Copilot Cowork takes a multi-step job and returns a completed result. Projects, which reached Cowork in October and Copilot Chat in November, groups related work. Copilot Workspaces, the evolution of Copilot Notebooks, gives a team a shared space with live cursors. Autopilot, a cloud-hosted agent that Microsoft says lives in your tenant with its own identity, memory, computer and workspace, is rolling out to Microsoft's Frontier early-access programme in November.
Claude can reach the same data, but it is a guest rather than the owner of the house. The Microsoft 365 connector is on every Claude plan, including Free. With a work or school account it covers SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook email and calendar, and Teams, after a Microsoft Entra Global Administrator grants a one-time consent; on Team and Enterprise the Claude organisation owner must also turn Microsoft 365 on. Claude can always search and analyse; on a work account, write actions such as sending email, managing calendar events and sending Teams messages depend on what your admin allows. With a personal Microsoft account the connector covers only Outlook and OneDrive, with email, calendar and OneDrive write tools on unless you turn them off. You add it from Customize > Connectors. It is genuinely useful for "find everything about this client and summarise it", but it does not give Claude Teams meeting recaps or the deep Graph grounding a Copilot licence does.
Writing and editing: Claude wins
Careful writing is what Claude is best known for, and Anthropic says Claude Opus 5.5 "communicates more naturally than prior models" and leads with the most important information. The bigger advantage is what happens after the draft. Claude Docs, Slides and Design are available on every plan, including Free, so a draft becomes a document you export to Word, PDF, Markdown or Google Docs. Memory, which you edit in Settings > Your Claude, keeps your tone and context consistent from one piece to the next.
Inside Word, Claude for Word drafts, redlines and reviews documents with tracked changes and comment-driven editing, which suits contracts, policies and anything a colleague will mark up. Copilot in Word is good at first drafts grounded in your own files, and with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence that grounding is a real advantage. For the quality of the writing itself, and for long documents where judgement across a lot of material matters, Claude is the stronger choice.
Spreadsheets and Excel: Claude wins for models, Copilot for everyday clean-up
This is the closest contest on the page, so it gets a split verdict. Claude for Excel answers questions about a workbook with cell-level citations you can click, changes assumptions while keeping formula relationships intact, traces errors such as #REF! to their root cause, and builds or populates models across multi-tab workbooks. It can sort, filter, edit pivot tables and apply conditional formatting, and it pulls outside data through connectors such as S&P Global, LSEG and Daloopa. Anthropic's own documentation warns against using it for final client deliverables without human review, and it does not support data tables, macros or VBA.
Copilot in Excel gained a clean data skill in October 2026 that finds duplicates and formatting issues and recommends fixes, plus accounting skills for reconciliation and journal entries and an interactive canvas that builds a live report from workbook data, both rolling out worldwide in November. If your job is building and auditing financial models, Claude is the better partner. If it is tidying exports, reconciling accounts and producing quick reports inside a company that already pays for Copilot, stay with Copilot.
Presentations and decks: Claude wins
Claude Slides, available on every plan including Free, turns a conversation into a deck you export to PowerPoint, PDF or Google Slides, and Claude for PowerPoint reads, edits and generates slides using your existing templates. Because the Claude add-ins share one conversation across Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook, you can analyse a workbook and then build slides from the result without pasting anything across.
Copilot in PowerPoint is a strong tool too, and since October 2026 it uses Sonnet 5.5 for a stronger design perspective on layouts and templates. PowerPoint's Record a skill feature saves a repeated presentation task for reuse. If you have a Copilot licence, you are already getting Anthropic's model inside PowerPoint. Without one, Claude gives you decks on the free plan, which is why it takes this round.
Coding and small apps: Claude wins
Claude Code comes with every paid Claude plan from Pro upwards, and Anthropic describes Opus 5.5 as particularly good at "long and sprawling jobs like codebase-wide migrations and audits". For anyone who writes or maintains software, this is not a close call. Copilot's own answer for non-developers is Code, which builds small apps, trackers and dashboards from plain language and is due as a preview for Microsoft 365 Premium and Pro later in 2026. Developers who want Microsoft's coding assistant should look at GitHub Copilot, a separate product, rather than Microsoft Copilot.
Handing over whole tasks: Claude for individuals, Copilot inside a Microsoft 365 company
Since 16 September 2026, Anthropic has been bringing Claude Cowork into every conversation, starting with Pro and Max: you can ask a quick question or hand Claude a bigger job without choosing a mode first, and it hands back files you can keep working on. Tasks run on demand or on a schedule you choose, and sessions keep running in the cloud when your computer is asleep. Computer use, where Claude clicks and types in apps on your screen, is a research preview that needs the Claude desktop app. A mode selector in the message box lets you approve each action manually or, in Auto mode, let Claude review each action for safety itself.
Copilot Cowork does the same kind of delegation inside Microsoft 365, with role-based plugins and a task catalog, and on a personal account it needs Microsoft 365 Premium or Pro. Microsoft is also moving personal users from Copilot Tasks to Cowork. For an individual or a small team, Claude's version is more flexible and available on more plans. For a company where the work happens in Outlook, Teams and SharePoint, Copilot Cowork has the better access to the material.
Free plans: Claude wins
Claude Free gives you Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Haiku 5.5, web search, file creation, code execution, memory, connectors including Microsoft 365, and Claude Docs, Slides and Design, within limits that reset every five hours with a weekly cap. It does not include Opus, Claude Code, Research or Claude in Chrome.
Copilot Free covers chat, image creation and file uploads, subject to available capacity, and Microsoft's pricing page itemises nothing more for it. If you want free image creation, Copilot is the obvious choice. For writing, files and finished documents, Claude's free plan does far more.
Privacy and your data: a draw at work, Claude on personal accounts
At work, both are safe for confidential material when set up properly. Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Chat for organisations are covered by enterprise data protection: prompts, responses and Microsoft Graph data are not used to train foundation models, your sensitivity labels, retention and audit apply, and web queries go to Bing with user and tenant identifiers removed. Claude Team and Enterprise do not train on your content by default, and Enterprise adds custom data retention, audit logs and a Compliance API.
Two details matter for European companies and for anyone mixing the products. First, Microsoft says Claude models inside its Copilot offerings are currently excluded from the EU Data Boundary, and tenants in the EU, EFTA and UK start with them switched off. An AI Administrator or Global Administrator changes this in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Copilot > Settings > View all > AI providers operating as Microsoft subprocessors. Second, the Claude for Excel add-in does not inherit an organisation's custom data retention settings and its activity is not in Enterprise audit logs, though it is covered by the Compliance API. Ask IT which route your company has approved before you paste client data into either.
On personal accounts, Claude documents its control clearly and Microsoft does not. Claude's Free, Pro and Max content can be used for training unless you opt out, and the switch is Settings > Privacy > Help Improve our AI models; turning it off stops new chats and coding sessions being used for future training. Microsoft's privacy controls page for the updated Copilot app lists memory, web search and ad personalisation under Settings > Personalization, but no model training setting, and it does not say whether conversations are used for training. A documented switch beats an undocumented policy, so Claude wins here.
Same task, both tools: a monthly forecast update for the leadership team
Here is how each tool approaches one realistic job, based on what Microsoft and Anthropic document. It describes the products, not test results. The task: update the monthly forecast workbook with new figures, explain what changed, pull in the relevant points from a week of email with the finance team, and produce a short memo and three slides.
How Microsoft 365 Copilot handles it
You start in Excel, where the clean data skill suggests fixes for the messy export, which you approve and Copilot summarises what moved. In Outlook, Copilot pulls the main points from the finance threads, because it can already see your mailbox through Microsoft Graph. You then hand the whole job to Cowork with the workbook and threads, ask for the memo and slides, and keep everything in a Project for next month. This needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, and it is the smoothest route when the emails and files all live in your tenant.
How Claude handles it
You open the workbook with Claude for Excel, ask it to trace how the forecast total is built and to flex the two assumptions that changed, and check each answer through its cell-level citations. With Claude for Outlook (in beta) or the Microsoft 365 connector, Claude reads the finance threads; any reply it drafts lands unsent in Outlook for you to review. Because the add-ins share context, you switch to Word for the memo and PowerPoint for the slides, using your company template, without repeating yourself. This needs a paid Claude plan, and on a work account your company may need to deploy the add-ins, while Claude for Outlook needs a one-time Microsoft Graph consent from an admin.
Verdict for this task: Claude if the hard part is the model and the explanation, because it shows its working cell by cell and writes the clearer memo. Microsoft 365 Copilot if the hard part is gathering scattered material from mail, Teams and SharePoint, because it already has that access under your company's controls.
Who should pick Copilot and who should pick Claude
- Pick Microsoft 365 Copilot if your company runs on Microsoft 365 and buys licences, and your work is mostly meetings, email and files that other people share with you. Its grounding in your tenant and its Teams recaps have no equal here.
- Pick Claude if the quality of the output is what you are judged on: reports, proposals, analysis, models and code. Start with Pro for Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Code and Research.
- Use both if your company already pays for Copilot but you want Claude's writing and Excel work: ask IT whether Claude models are switched on in Copilot, or whether the Claude for Microsoft 365 add-ins are approved.
- Pick consumer Copilot if you already pay for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family and mainly want light help in Word and Outlook. Remember that on Family only the owner gets the AI features.
- Not for you: Copilot Free is not a substitute for Claude for serious writing, and Claude is not a substitute for a Copilot licence if you need answers from every Teams meeting and SharePoint site in your company.
Learn either tool properly with the free courses at Learn Claude and Learn Copilot, or read the full guides to Microsoft Copilot and Claude. For other match-ups, see ChatGPT vs Claude, ChatGPT vs Copilot, Copilot vs Gemini, the list of Copilot alternatives, or build your own side-by-side on the Compare page.
Prompts to copy
Explain and flex a forecast model (Claude for Excel or Copilot in Excel)
Walk me through how the total in [cell or row, e.g. the forecast total on the Summary tab] is calculated, citing each cell you rely on. Then change [assumption, e.g. the growth rate in March] from [old value] to [new value], keep every formula relationship intact, and tell me which outputs changed and by how much. Flag anything that looks like an error or a hard-coded number.
You get: A traceable explanation of the model and a safe what-if change you can check cell by cell
Pull the decisions out of a week of email (Copilot or Claude with Microsoft 365)
Search my email and Teams messages from [date range] about [project or client name]. List every decision that was made, who made it and when, every open question with the person who owns it, and any deadline mentioned. Quote one short line as evidence for each item and link to the message.
You get: A decision and action log with evidence, ready to paste into a status update
Turn analysis into a memo and three slides (either)
Using [the workbook or analysis you just completed], write a one-page memo for [audience] that opens with the single most important change, then explains the two main causes and the risk to watch. Then draft three slides in [our company template]: headline result, what changed and why, and the decision we need. Keep every number identical to the source and list the figures I must check before sending.
You get: A leadership-ready memo and slide outline that stays consistent with your numbers