Microsoft Copilot Studio

Microsoft Copilot Studio is Microsoft's low-code environment for designing, testing and publishing AI agents. It sits inside the Power Platform and Microsoft 365 ecosystem, letting makers wire agents to enterprise data, Teams, Dynamics 365 and third-party APIs without heavy custom code.

Microsoft updates the platform on a rolling basis and publishes change logs rather than a single fixed version number. As of its September and October 2026 updates, Microsoft added Apps, a public-preview feature that builds apps from natural language, hosted on the new Copilot Managed Runtime (also public preview). Foundry IQ integration reached general availability, alongside an expanded review panel and evaluations. Starting October 15, 2026, Microsoft began rolling out agent accounts (agents with their own Microsoft 365 identity), the ability to @mention agents in Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and business process memory and triggers, all currently limited to the Frontier program rather than generally available.

On the capability side, the platform supports multi-agent orchestration and is extending from chatbot-style agents toward persistent, proactive agents that run shared business processes. In the Prompt Tool, makers can choose among models from vendors including OpenAI and Anthropic, with some options generally available and others offered as experimental previews.

Pricing runs on Copilot Credits. A prepaid capacity pack costs $200 per pack per month for 25,000 Copilot Credits, tenant-wide. Pay-as-you-go is also metered per credit, though the per-credit rate is not published, and requires linking an Azure subscription to the environment. A one-year prepay of Copilot Credit Commit Units can save up to 20%. A Microsoft 365 Copilot license, at $30 per user per month billed annually, includes the Standard harness for building internal agents, but publishing to external channels or using the GitHub Copilot harness requires the standalone Copilot Studio plan.

The main limitation is that there is no free production tier. A free trial exists but is time-limited and cannot publish agents; a free Azure account separately provides a $200 Azure credit. Pay-as-you-go billing requires an Azure subscription and its exact per-credit cost is not disclosed on Microsoft's pricing pages, making costs harder to forecast upfront. The newest agent-account and natural-language app features are also still previews or limited to the Frontier program, not broadly available.

Copilot Studio suits organizations already invested in Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 or Azure that want governed, low-code agents connected to their existing data. It is a weaker fit for individuals or small teams wanting a genuinely free way to ship an agent to production.