Copilot vs Gemini for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365: Business Pricing Compared

The Workspace Business Starter trap: "included" does not mean "all of it"

This is the fact worth the whole page, and it is missing from almost every article on the subject. Gemini is included in Workspace Business and Enterprise editions, yes. But Google's own feature matrix marks the Gemini on Business Starter as "Limited", and the detail underneath is much sharper than that word suggests.

On Business Starter, read off workspace.google.com on September 2, 2026: Gemini in Gmail is included and Gemini in Vids is included. Gemini in Docs, Gemini in Sheets, Gemini in Slides, Gemini in Drive, Gemini in Meet and Gemini in Chat are all excluded. The Gemini app is limited to "Basic access", and the row for "Google's most capable AI models for complex tasks" is blank on Starter and ticked on every plan above it.

Think about what that leaves. The thing people actually want from suite AI is help writing the document, building the spreadsheet formula, and summarizing the meeting they missed. On the cheapest Workspace plan you get none of those three. You get AI in your inbox and a video tool. Business Standard and above get the full matrix and "Expanded access" to the Gemini app.

So the accurate sentence, if you are budgeting, is not "Gemini is free with Workspace". It is "the Gemini that competes with Copilot is included from Business Standard upward". That is still a genuinely better deal than paying for Copilot on top. It is just not the deal the free-with-Workspace framing implies, and if you buy Starter expecting Copilot-equivalent AI you will be disappointed in about a day.

The Microsoft trap runs the other way, and we had it wrong too

Microsoft's entry tier is misread in the opposite direction: people assume the cheap base plan is disqualified when it is not. We got this wrong ourselves and corrected it on September 2, 2026, so this is us fixing our own page rather than scoring a point.

The near-universal claim in comparison articles, and until today on our own Copilot page, is that Microsoft 365 Business Basic does not qualify for the Copilot add-on, which forces a small business up to Business Standard and makes the cheapest all-in $41.50 per user per month. That is false. Microsoft's Copilot Business FAQ states it directly: "If you have a Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard, or Business Premium plan, you can buy Microsoft Copilot Business as an add-on." The same document adds that Copilot Business can be added to any Microsoft 365 for business plan, "including those plans without Teams".

Run the arithmetic with Basic allowed and the Microsoft entry price drops by nearly 40 percent. Business Basic is $7.00 per user per month paid yearly. Copilot Business is $18.00 on an annual commitment. That is $25.00 per user per month all-in, against $41.50 on Standard and $50.00 on Premium. If all you want is Copilot in Outlook and Teams on the web, and you do not need the desktop Office apps that Standard buys you, $25.00 is the honest floor.

Two caveats before you build a budget on it. Business Basic does not include the installed desktop versions of Word, Excel and Outlook, so if your team wants Copilot inside desktop Excel, Basic is not enough and you are back to $41.50. And the $18 is promotional.

Read the Copilot promotion before you budget for year two

The $18 figure everyone quotes carries four conditions, all verified at microsoft.com on September 2, 2026, and the fourth is the one that bites.

It runs from July 1 to December 31, 2026. It requires an annual commitment, not month to month. It is open only to existing customers already on an eligible Microsoft 365 Business plan, so it is a discount for expanding your spend rather than an offer to new buyers. And it applies to the first year only: year two renews at the $21 list price. There is a 7-day cancellation window for a prorated refund.

So a ten person office on Business Basic should budget $2,220 in year one ($840 of base plus $1,380 of Copilot after the discount, at $25.00 a head) and $2,880 in year two once the AI line reverts to $21. That $360 step is small in absolute terms and large as a percentage, and it lands exactly when the renewal is easiest to wave through.

One more constraint worth knowing before you standardize on the cheaper seat: Copilot Business is capped at 300 seats per tenant, and Microsoft says organizations above that should move to the $30 enterprise seat. There is also a one-way door in the licensing. If you are on Business Standard or Premium with Copilot Business, you cannot upgrade to an Enterprise plan until your commitment ends.

Why we will not print a Google Workspace price, and what to do about it

Every other figure on this page came off a vendor page we read ourselves. The Workspace plan prices did not, and we are not going to print them, because we could not verify them to the standard we hold the rest of this page to.

The reason is specific and worth stating plainly: workspace.google.com geolocates the visitor and serves the pricing table in local currency. Checked four different ways on September 2, 2026, including a direct fetch, a command-line request with United States headers and an English United States locale forced in the URL, and a full-page screenshot, Google returned the whole table in Polish zloty, with the page footer reading "All prices zl PLN". We are not going to convert a foreign-currency figure and present it as a US price, and we are not going to copy a number out of another article that may have done exactly that.

What you should do instead takes about a minute and is more reliable than any article including this one. Open workspace.google.com from the machine you will actually buy on, set the user count to your real headcount, and toggle to annual billing. Google prices Business Starter, Standard and Plus for up to 300 users and quotes Enterprise separately, and it applies promotional discounts at checkout that no comparison article can show you. Read your own number.

The structural facts, which do not depend on currency, are the ones this page is built on: the AI is included rather than sold separately, Starter's version of it is materially cut down, and there is now a paid tier above the included one.

Google now sells a paid AI tier too, and nobody has noticed

The "Gemini is free with Workspace" line is already going stale in a second way. Google has introduced AI Expanded Access, a paid add-on available on Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus. It raises limits on things like image and video generation and speech translation.

Two things follow from that, and they matter for anyone planning more than a year ahead. First, the included Gemini has ceilings, even on the plans that get the full feature matrix. It is included, not unlimited, and if your team leans hard on generation you will meet a limit. Google publishes no USD figure for AI Expanded Access, saying only that pricing depends on your local currency, so we cannot tell you what crossing that ceiling costs. Ask for it in writing before you commit.

Second, and more quietly, Google labels several AI features as carrying "Promotional access", which its own documentation explains as higher limits applying temporarily before enforcement begins. In plain terms, some of what is generous today is generous on purpose and for now. That is not a reason to avoid Workspace. It is a reason to treat "included at no additional cost" as a description of today's bill rather than a permanent property of the product.

Which is better, Copilot or Gemini?

Neither, and the question is almost always the wrong one, because the suite decides the assistant rather than the other way round. If you run on Microsoft 365 you are choosing Copilot or no suite AI. If you run on Google Workspace you are choosing Gemini or no suite AI. Switching suites to get a different assistant means migrating mail, files, identity and permissions, retraining everyone, and rebuilding whatever integrations you have, which costs vastly more than either AI line item.

That said, the two are genuinely better at different things, and if you are one of the rare businesses that could go either way, it is worth knowing which. Copilot is stronger at producing structured output inside documents: turning a Word document into a formatted deck, working across a real Excel model, pulling a recap and action items out of a Teams call. Its advantage is depth inside the Office file formats that business runs on.

Gemini is stronger at reasoning over long inputs and at open-ended work: reading a long document and answering questions about it, research, drafting in a more natural register. If your team writes marketing copy and reads long reports, that lands better than a formula assistant.

The realistic recommendation for almost everyone: keep the suite you have, turn on the AI that comes with it or add the one that does not, use it hard for a month, and only then decide whether the remaining problem is an AI problem at all. Very often it is not.

When neither one is what you actually needed

We should state our own stake, because everything above was written by a company that sells something adjacent. Officeagent is an AI office assistant, not a productivity suite, and we are deliberately absent from the comparison table below. We would lose a like-for-like comparison against either of these on their own terms, and neither Microsoft nor Google is trying to do what we do. Treat the next paragraph skeptically for exactly that reason.

Both Copilot and Gemini are assistants that help you produce things faster while you are sitting in the app. Neither one works the queue of small jobs that happen between the apps: nobody replied to the client asking for three times next week, the signed contract is still sitting in an inbox rather than the right Drive folder, the invoice went out nine days ago and nobody chased it. Copilot will draft that chase email beautifully if you open Outlook and ask it to. It will not notice that it needs sending.

If your honest complaint after a month with either tool is "the writing got faster but the admin still is not done", that is a different category of product, and we describe how the draft, approve and execute loop works on how Officeagent works and compare ourselves directly on Microsoft Copilot alternative. If your complaint is "I wish the first draft were quicker", buy the AI that comes with your suite and ignore us entirely.

How to decide in five questions

Answer in order and stop at the first one that gives you a clear answer.

• Which suite are you already on? This answers it for roughly nine buyers in ten. Microsoft 365 means Copilot, Google Workspace means Gemini, and switching suites for the AI is almost never worth what it costs.
• On Workspace, which edition? If you are on Business Starter, the included Gemini does not work in Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Meet or Chat. Price the step up to Business Standard before you conclude your AI is disappointing, because the AI is not the problem, the edition is.
• On Microsoft, do you need desktop Office? If not, Business Basic qualifies for Copilot Business and your all-in is $25.00 per user per month. If your team needs Copilot inside installed Excel and Word, you need Business Standard and $41.50.
• Are you above 300 seats? Copilot Business is capped there. Above it you are on the $30 enterprise seat with an E3 or E5 base underneath, which is a materially different budget.
• Is the problem writing, or is it work not getting finished? Both of these tools fix the first and neither fixes the second. Being honest about which one you have will save you more money than picking correctly between them.