"Which Copilot do we buy?" is one of the most common questions we field from Australian leadership teams, and it usually comes loaded with a false assumption — that there is one Copilot with a few tiers. There isn't. GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot are two genuinely different products that happen to share a brand name. They serve different people, sit in different parts of your stack, and are licensed separately. Buying the wrong one because the names collided is an easy and expensive mistake.
This guide settles the confusion in plain English: what each Copilot actually does, what they cost in Australian dollars, who in your business each one is for, and why a software team frequently ends up paying for both. No vendor-deck gloss — just the senior-practitioner version we'd give a client across the table.
The one-sentence difference
GitHub Copilot helps developers write and review code inside their editor. Microsoft 365 Copilot helps everyone else draft, summarise and analyse inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. One lives where your engineers work; the other lives where your office staff work. If you remember nothing else, remember that split.
What GitHub Copilot actually does
GitHub Copilot sits inside developer tools — Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim — and inside GitHub itself. It autocompletes code as you type, answers questions about a codebase in a chat pane, explains unfamiliar functions, writes unit tests, and increasingly drafts pull-request reviews and works through multi-step coding tasks as an agent. Its context is your source code and your repositories, not your inbox or your spreadsheets.
For a working software team it is a meaningful accelerator on the repetitive parts of the job: boilerplate, test scaffolding, regex, translating between languages, understanding code someone else wrote three years ago. It does not replace engineering judgement, and anyone selling it as such is overselling. It removes friction, and on a busy team that friction adds up.
What Microsoft 365 Copilot actually does
Microsoft 365 Copilot is woven through the Office apps your whole organisation already uses. It drafts and rewrites in Word, builds first-pass decks in PowerPoint, writes formulas and analyses data in Excel, summarises long email threads and drafts replies in Outlook, and recaps meetings you missed in Teams. Crucially, it is grounded in your Microsoft 365 tenant — your files, emails, chats and calendar via Microsoft Graph — so its answers reference your actual business content, subject to your existing permissions.
That grounding is the real value and the real risk. The upside is genuinely useful, context-aware drafting. The catch is that Copilot will happily surface anything a user already has access to, which is why oversharing in SharePoint and Teams becomes a live problem the moment you switch it on. That's a governance conversation, not a licensing one — but it's the conversation that decides whether a rollout goes well.
The pricing, in Australian dollars
Prices below are indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase, as your final invoiced amount depends on agreement type (CSP, Enterprise Agreement, Microsoft Customer Agreement), currency at billing date, and any promotional windows. All figures are ex GST.
- GitHub Copilot Business — around USD $19 per user/month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase). Adds organisation-wide policy controls, audit logs and IP indemnity over the individual plans.
- GitHub Copilot Enterprise — around USD $39 per user/month (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase), and note the Enterprise tier generally assumes you're on GitHub Enterprise Cloud, which carries its own per-user cost on top.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot — around USD $30 per user/month, roughly AUD $45 per seat/month under Microsoft's regional pricing (indicative AUD list — confirm at purchase). It requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence underneath — you cannot buy it standalone.
Why the names cause so much grief
Microsoft has used "Copilot" as an umbrella brand across a dozen products — there's also the free Microsoft Copilot consumer chat, Copilot in Windows, Security Copilot, and Copilot Studio for building agents. So when a finance lead asks IT to "turn on Copilot," nobody can action it without a follow-up question. We've seen procurement approve one product believing it covered the other, and we've seen developers handed Microsoft 365 Copilot and wondering where the code completion went. The brand is a genuine source of wasted spend.
The fix is boring but reliable: never say "Copilot" unaccompanied in a budget request or a rollout plan. Always write the full product name — GitHub Copilot Business, or Microsoft 365 Copilot — so the line item is unambiguous.
Why dev teams buy both
Here's the part that trips up cost-conscious buyers: a software team is not an either/or. Your engineers need GitHub Copilot to do their actual job — writing code. But those same engineers also live in Outlook, Teams, Word and Excel for standups, specs, status reports, estimates and stakeholder email. Microsoft 365 Copilot serves that half of their day, and it serves the entire non-engineering organisation around them — sales, ops, finance, leadership.
So the two aren't competing for the same dollar. They cover different surfaces of the same person's week and different populations of staff. A developer with both gets coding acceleration in the IDE and drafting acceleration everywhere else. Treating them as rivals to pick between is the conceptual error; they're complementary layers.
Which one — what we'd actually do
If you have a software engineering team and your priority is shipping code faster, start with GitHub Copilot Business. It's the lower-risk, lower-cost entry point, the value is immediate and easy to feel, and the governance footprint is small because it's scoped to your repositories. Pilot it with a handful of developers, look at whether they'd refuse to give it back after a fortnight, then scale.
If your priority is lifting productivity across the whole business — the office work, not the code — Microsoft 365 Copilot is the lever, but do not switch it on before you've done the access-and-oversharing groundwork in your tenant. The licence is the cheap part; an uncontrolled rollout that surfaces salary spreadsheets or board papers to the wrong people is the expensive part. Sort permissions, sensitivity labels and SharePoint sprawl first, then enable Copilot to a controlled pilot group.
If you're a software business with both engineers and a back office — which is most of our clients — the honest answer is you'll likely want both, sequenced. GitHub Copilot for the dev team now because it's fast to value and low-risk; Microsoft 365 Copilot once the tenant is tidy enough to deserve it. Run the per-seat AUD numbers against the populations who'll genuinely use each, not a blanket all-staff count, and the business case usually writes itself.
The bottom line
Two products, one unfortunate name. GitHub Copilot is for the people writing code; Microsoft 365 Copilot is for everyone working in Office. They're licensed separately, priced separately, and governed differently — and a software team commonly needs both because they cover different parts of the same working day. Get the names straight, scope each pilot to the people who'll actually use it, and do the M365 governance homework before you flip the Office switch.