Is Microsoft Copilot Worth It If You Already Pay for ChatGPT?

Microsoft switched Copilot on inside my Microsoft 365 subscription without me asking for it, and for months I ignored it completely — I already paid for ChatGPT Plus and it did everything I needed a chatbot to do. Then a week landed where three reports were due on the same Friday afternoon, and I finally ran the two head-to-head, on my own inbox and my own spreadsheets, to settle it properly.

This is intermediate level — you'll get the most out of it if you already have a Microsoft 365 subscription with Copilot switched on (Personal, Family or a paid work plan) and an existing ChatGPT subscription to test it against, rather than just taking my word for it. If you haven't settled on a first AI tool at all yet, my ChatGPT for beginners guide is the better place to start — come back here once you're already paying for something and wondering whether you need to pay for a second one too.

Why "is Copilot worth it" is the wrong first question

Microsoft sells at least three different things under the name Copilot, and most of the "is it worth it" arguments I'd read online were comparing ChatGPT against whichever one the writer happened to be using — which is a bit like asking whether "a car" is worth it without saying which car. Before you can honestly compare Copilot to ChatGPT, you have to work out which Copilot is actually sitting in front of you.

Step 1: Work out which Copilot you're actually being asked to pay for

The free version — Copilot in Windows, Edge or on copilot.microsoft.com — is a general chat assistant, and it's the closest match to ChatGPT's free tier: useful for quick questions, drafting and brainstorming, with no access to anything of yours beyond what you paste into the chat box.

The paid version most people actually meet is bundled into a Microsoft 365 subscription rather than sold on its own. On Microsoft's UK pricing when I last checked for my AI tool prices page, that's Personal at £8.49 a month, Family at £10.49, or Premium — the tier with the fuller Copilot features — at £18.99. A workplace version, Microsoft 365 Copilot, is a separate per-seat licence a business buys, and if that's the one on your work laptop, cancelling anything is your IT department's decision, not yours.

Work out which one you're looking at before you go any further, because the free version and the Premium-tier version answer this whole question very differently.

Step 2: Test the one thing ChatGPT genuinely can't do on its own

Open Word or Outlook, find the Copilot icon in the ribbon, and ask it something that only makes sense if it can see your own content — "summarise the email thread with [a real name] from this morning" or "draft a reply using the attachment on this email." Because Copilot is built into the app, it can read what's actually in your mailbox or document and answer directly, no copy-pasting required.

Now try the same task in ChatGPT. Unless you've gone out of your way to connect it to your Outlook or OneDrive account, it has no idea your inbox exists — you'd have to open the email yourself, copy the text across, and paste it into the chat before ChatGPT could touch it. That gap, not writing quality, is the real reason Copilot exists at all.

Step 3: Run the exact same real task through both, for a week

Pick something you actually do weekly — for me it was a Friday status report pulled from that week's emails and a project spreadsheet. Monday to Friday, I ran it through Copilot inside Outlook and Word, and separately through ChatGPT with everything pasted in by hand, and timed both. Copilot won on speed almost every day, purely because there was nothing to copy. It didn't always win on the writing itself — I found myself editing its drafts more than ChatGPT's, which tracks with what independent benchmarks have generally found about the underlying model quality gap between the two. Grounding beat prose quality for this particular task, but that trade-off won't hold for every job.

Step 4: Look for where they quietly do the same job twice

Once you get past file-grounding, a lot of what people use Copilot for — brainstorming, generic email drafts, explaining a concept, writing code snippets — ChatGPT already does, and in my week of testing, usually did it with less back-and-forth editing. If that generic chat work is most of what you're using Copilot for, you're very likely paying twice for the same job. Grounding in your own files is the one thing that's genuinely hard to replace; everything else is closer to a coin flip.

Step 5: Decide by what you'd miss, not by which one is "smarter"

By the end of the week the decision wasn't close for me: I kept Premium for the mailbox and document grounding, and I kept ChatGPT Plus for everything else, because the two were doing different jobs rather than competing for the same one. If your week looks the same — genuinely different jobs — paying for both isn't waste. If it doesn't, and one of them was just sitting there because a Microsoft update switched it on without asking, that's the one to cancel.

This is the same discipline that got me to finally cancel a budgeting app I'd kept out of habit long after I stopped opening it — I wrote about that here — and it's worth running on any subscription that might be quietly duplicating something you already own, tech or otherwise.

Common mistakes worth avoiding

1. Comparing "Copilot" to ChatGPT as if Copilot is one product. The free version, Copilot Pro-tier features and a business's Microsoft 365 Copilot licence are different enough in capability that the "worth it" answer genuinely changes between them.
2. Judging Copilot on writing quality alone. If you never test the file-grounding, you're comparing it on the one thing ChatGPT has generally done better, and missing the one thing Copilot does that ChatGPT can't.
3. Keeping both because cancelling feels wasteful. A subscription earns its keep by doing a job the other tool can't, the same test I'd apply to any desk gadget before it earns a permanent spot — not by existing.
4. Forgetting who's actually paying. If Copilot showed up on a work laptop, your employer licensed it — the "should I cancel it" question doesn't apply to you at all.

If deciding which AI tools genuinely earn a place in your day is where you're stuck, the rest of my AI tools guides cover the same ground for Claude, NotebookLM and a handful of others, and my Your First 30 Days With AI course walks through that whole decision — the first two modules are free.

Questions people actually ask

What's the actual difference between Copilot, Copilot Pro and Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Copilot on its own (in Windows, Edge or the Copilot app) is free general chat. The paid features — reading your own mail, documents and files — come bundled into a Microsoft 365 Personal, Family or Premium subscription for individuals, or a separate Microsoft 365 Copilot licence for businesses. The name is the same across all three; the capability is not.

Do I need to pay for Microsoft 365 to use Copilot at all?

No — the free version at copilot.microsoft.com or built into Windows and Edge works without any subscription. You only need to pay once you want it reading your actual emails, documents or spreadsheets rather than just chatting generically.

Can Microsoft Copilot replace ChatGPT completely?

For me, no — and Step 3 above is why. Copilot won decisively on tasks that needed my own files, but I preferred ChatGPT's writing on tasks that didn't. If your work is mostly inside Word, Excel and Outlook, Copilot alone might genuinely cover you; if it isn't, you'll likely still want a general assistant alongside it.

Does Copilot read my private emails to train Microsoft's AI model?

Microsoft's stated position is that Microsoft 365 Copilot doesn't use your organisation's data — emails, documents or chats — to train its underlying models; it uses that content only to generate your answer, within the same permissions you already have. Worth reading Microsoft's own privacy documentation for your specific plan before you rely on it for anything sensitive, since consumer and business terms aren't identical.

Is Copilot worth it if I only use ChatGPT for personal, non-work stuff?

Probably not on its own merits. Copilot's advantage is reading files you already have inside Microsoft's ecosystem — work documents, a shared inbox, a spreadsheet. If your day doesn't already run through Word, Excel or Outlook, you're paying for grounding you'll rarely use, and the free tier or your existing ChatGPT plan will cover the rest.