The question “Copilot for business or ChatGPT” is usually a question about something else: whether to buy licences for everyone, for a handful of people, or to commission something built to order. “Copilot” here means Microsoft 365 Copilot, the assistant in Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams — not GitHub Copilot for developers, not Copilot Studio for building agents, and not the free Copilot Chat. ChatGPT for business today means the Business plan; Claude for business means Team. We are writing about a firm of 10–50 people, and about business plans rather than consumer ones.
We read the prices and terms off the providers’ own sites on 6 September 2026, and the exchange rates from Table A of the NBP, Poland’s central bank, dated 4 September 2026. A figure without a date is useless here — prices changed twice this year. The sequence “off-the-shelf tool → in-house → with a contractor” is set out in how to implement AI in your company; this article settles its first term.
First, work out which Copilot and which ChatGPT you mean
Microsoft. “Microsoft 365 Copilot for business” is an add-on to the Business plans (Basic, Standard, Premium) — the plans for 1–300 users. Since 1 July 2026 there are also “Business Standard and Copilot” and “Business Premium and Copilot” bundles with Copilot in the price. “Microsoft 365 Copilot” with no suffix is the enterprise version, for firms above 300 people and for E3/E5 plans. The free Copilot Chat from a work account does not include Copilot in the Office applications. Microsoft is renaming the product to “Microsoft Copilot”; the Polish price list still uses the old name, so we do too.
OpenAI. ChatGPT Team was renamed ChatGPT Business on 29 August 2025 — anything still talking about “ChatGPT Team” is out of date. Enterprise is a separate plan with no public price.
Anthropic. Claude Team and Claude Enterprise are the business plans. Pro and Max at Anthropic, and Plus, Pro and Go at OpenAI, are individual accounts even when the company pays — a distinction that returns in the section on data, because individual accounts follow different training rules.
Three business plans: what the price buys (as at 6 September 2026)
| Plan | Price per user per month (annual / monthly) | Minimum and condition | Administration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 Copilot for business (add-on) | €15.60 promotional to 31 December 2026, regular €18.20 / €21.84 | from 1 user; a Microsoft 365 Business licence: Basic €6.07, Standard €12.13, Premium €19.06 | Entra ID, Purview |
| Business Standard and Copilot (bundle) | €20.36 / €24.43 | from 1 user | as above |
| Business Premium and Copilot (bundle) | €27.73 / €33.28 | from 1 user | as above |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot (enterprise) | €26.00 / €27.30 | above 300 people, or an E3/E5 plan | as above |
| ChatGPT Business | standard $20 / $25; premium $100 / $125 (5× higher limits) | minimum 2 seats | SSO, admin console, retention controls |
| ChatGPT Enterprise | quoted individually | contract | SCIM, RBAC, data residency |
| Claude Team | standard $20 / $25; premium $100 / $125 (5× higher limits) | minimum 2 members | SSO, domain capture, Claude Code included |
| Claude Enterprise | $20 per seat plus usage, which depends on the model and the task; annual only | contract | SCIM, audit logs, custom retention |
Prices exclude VAT; the first figure is the annual commitment, the second monthly billing. Microsoft bills Polish customers in euro from its pl-pl price list; OpenAI and Anthropic bill in dollars. The €15.60 is promotional, and the price-list footnote reads: “The discount offer is available from 1 July 2026 to 31 December 2026.” The bundle prices carried no promotional marking on the day we read them. Sources: Microsoft 365 Copilot price list, the ChatGPT Business plan description, Claude pricing. Claude Code, included in a Team seat — a tool for working with code in the terminal — we cover separately in the guide to Claude Code.
What Copilot, ChatGPT and Claude cost a year in zloty: a firm of 25
This is a worked example, not a client case. Assumptions: 25 people, 12 months, annual billing, prices excluding VAT, NBP mid rates of 4 September 2026 (Table A no. 172/A/NBP/2026: €1 = 4.3179 zł, $1 = 3.7145 zł). VAT and your card provider’s own rate come on top.
| Option (25 people, 12 months) | In currency | In zł, excluding VAT |
|---|---|---|
| Copilot in the bundle (Business Standard → “Business Standard and Copilot”, €8.23 per person) | €2,469 | approx. 10,661 zł |
| Copilot as an add-on, promotional €15.60 | €4,680 | approx. 20,208 zł |
| Copilot as an add-on, regular €18.20 | €5,460 | approx. 23,576 zł |
| Copilot as an add-on, no commitment €21.84 | €6,552 | approx. 28,291 zł |
| ChatGPT Business or Claude Team, 25 standard seats | $6,000 | approx. 22,287 zł |
| Claude Team, 20 standard seats and 5 premium | $10,800 | approx. 40,117 zł |
| Only the 5 people who really use it: ChatGPT Business or Claude Team | $1,200 | approx. 4,457 zł |
| Only 5 people: Copilot as an add-on, promotional | €936 | approx. 4,042 zł |
Per person per month: €8.23 is about 36 zł, €15.60 is 67 zł, $20 is 74 zł, $100 is 371 zł.
Two conclusions. First: the largest saving in this comparison does not come from picking a provider, but from whether you buy Copilot as an add-on or move to the bundle — €8.23 against €15.60 for the same product, and against €18.20 once the promotion expires. That difference is there on Microsoft’s own page; on Business Premium it is €8.67. Whether the bundle prices survive the new year is worth checking on the day you buy.
Second: at 25 standard seats the three providers land between roughly 10,700 and 22,300 zł a year, while going from 25 seats to 5 takes about 17,800 zł off the bill — more than switching provider does. Which is why “let’s buy it for everyone and see” is the most expensive way to run a pilot.
Where the data goes: training, region, retention
A tool is not GDPR-compliant in itself — what is compliant, or is not, is your use of it. Check four things in the terms of the specific plan: training, region, retention and the contract. As at 6 September 2026:
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | ChatGPT Business | Claude Team | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Training on your content | no (prompts, responses, Microsoft Graph data) | no, by default | no, by default (Team, Enterprise, API) |
| Processing region | EU Data Boundary for EU customers; Anthropic models in Copilot sit outside the EUDB and are off by default for EUDB customers and for those in the United Kingdom | Europe (EEA and Switzerland) on Enterprise and Edu only; Business — none | we did not find an EU region for Team and Enterprise in the official material; API: “global” or “us”; Europe via AWS Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI |
| Retention and deletion | as with other M365 content, retention through Purview, the user can delete history | set by the administrator; deleted conversations go within 30 days | we are not stating one — we found no confirmed period for Team; Enterprise: custom retention |
| Data processing agreement | Microsoft DPA in the Product Terms | DPA via a form | Anthropic DPA in the commercial terms |
Sources: Microsoft — Copilot privacy, Microsoft — Anthropic models, OpenAI — business plan privacy, OpenAI — data residency, Anthropic — regional compliance.
The real line runs not between providers but between company and individual accounts. OpenAI says plainly that it uses data from the consumer version of ChatGPT for training unless the user turns that off in settings. Anthropic, after the change to its consumer terms on 28 August 2025, makes users on the Free, Pro and Max plans choose whether they agree to training; with consent the data is kept five years, without it 30 days. None of this applies to Team, Enterprise or the API. The employee pasting company documents in from a personal account is therefore the first problem to solve — before any licensing decision at all.
The region does not close the transfer question: if support staff or a further processor outside the EEA reach the data, Chapter V of the GDPR applies wherever the server stands. How we establish the model provider’s role separately for each operation is set out on our page about data security and the GDPR. For Claude this is the one place where “licence or implementation” is settled by data location alone: we found European processing only through the API on Bedrock or Vertex AI — and that is building, not licensing.
Copilot does not leak — Copilot surfaces: only what the user already has read access to, and that sometimes takes in old HR folders and salary spreadsheets nobody remembered. Put SharePoint permissions in order before you buy seats, not after the first incident.
This describes the technical and organisational side; it is not legal advice — the legal assessment belongs to your lawyer or data protection officer. The seven decisions to take before sending data to a model are set out in GDPR and an LLM implementation. Under the EU AI Act a company using these tools is most likely a deployer rather than a provider — lighter obligations, but not zero: Article 4, on AI literacy, has applied since 2 February 2025. We have collected the deadlines under the AI Act technical compliance sprint.
Copilot, ChatGPT or Claude: how to choose without testing on 25 people
Not by a model ranking — those change monthly, and the decision has to hold for a year. Three questions settle more.
Where does the work live? If the documents, email and meetings are in Microsoft 365, Copilot has an advantage ChatGPT and Claude do not: it sees the context without anything being copied, and it respects permissions. If the work is writing, analysis and problem-solving outside Office, ChatGPT Business or Claude Team give you a more general tool at a similar price — they see what someone pastes, attaches or connects, and nothing else. For long documents and code, Claude is chosen more often; we still will not give you a model ranking.
Who administers it? If you have Entra ID and someone who runs it, Copilot is the path of least resistance — accounts, permissions and retention already exist. Without IT, the ChatGPT Business and Claude Team consoles are simpler: SSO login and a few settings.
Where must the data stay? A hard requirement to process inside the Union rules out ChatGPT Business today, and Claude Team too — until Anthropic publishes a European region, which we did not find in the official material. That leaves Copilot inside the EU Data Boundary (with the Anthropic models disabled) and ChatGPT Enterprise — or building on the API.
Then a pilot that settles something: 5 seats of one tool, 30 days, one measured task per person written down before the start (“time to prepare a quote, from 3 hours to…”), and a stop rule in writing. Without that, a pilot ends in “looks promising”, which is not a result. The most common state of firms that have already bought something: the licences exist and nobody uses them. That is usually not a tool problem but a missing process and training — buying more licences changes nothing.
Does Copilot work in Polish? Yes — Polish is on Microsoft’s list of supported Copilot languages (page dated February 2026). We say nothing about the quality of its Polish answers, because we have no measurement of our own and we do not borrow other people’s.
When a licence is enough — and that is good news
A licence is enough, and is the right choice, when the work is personal: someone writes, summarises, translates, does the first pass over a spreadsheet, tidies up meeting notes, and decides for themselves what to do with the result. There is no integration, no process, no approval flow — just a person and a tool. In a firm of 10–50 people that covers a good share of the sensible uses of AI, and none of them needs a contractor.
Our page on what we don’t do carries the line: “Don’t build what you can buy on subscription — we will say so even when it means no work for us.” We will say it on a call too. If your conclusion from this article is “five licences and a tidy-up of permissions”, that is a good conclusion, and you do not need us to reach it.
When a licence stops being enough: three tests
Test 1 — repetition. The same task dozens of times a month under fixed rules: purchase invoices, orders arriving by email, tickets to be categorised. The bottleneck is the person pasting each case into a chat window and pasting the answer back out — not the model. A second licence doubles the throughput and doubles the copy-pasting.
Test 2 — data out of the tool’s reach. The input sits in an ERP, a CRM, the orders inbox or in scans, and the result has to go back into a system rather than the clipboard. Copilot connectors and apps in ChatGPT cover some of these cases, but every integration missing from the catalogue is a point where the licence ends and building begins.
Test 3 — who approves. Anything that goes out to a customer or changes the state of a system needs a designed approval step, because someone has to answer for the result. A rule we do not bend: the system prepares, a person approves. A licensed tool has no such step; it has to be built into the flow.
If even one test comes back “yes”, building adds what a licence cannot: the integration, the model’s access to your data (RAG), the approval flow and the logs. The cost has two lines — a one-off build and monthly upkeep — and the model itself is a small item in them. A worked figure: 2,000 documents a month at roughly 3,000 input tokens and 1,000 output on Claude Sonnet 5 ($2 and $10 per million tokens, September 2026) is about $32, or roughly 120 zł a month. The cost is in the build and the upkeep, not the tokens. Which processes qualify is on our page about AI automation in business, and what the bill is made of in how much an AI implementation costs. We will not give a range here: without knowing the process it would be guesswork.
The middle road is agents built in Copilot Studio inside Microsoft 365, billed in Copilot Credits either prepaid or by consumption; in some scenarios — in Copilot Chat, Teams and SharePoint — the Microsoft 365 Copilot licence covers them (billing rules). Good when everything is in M365; limited when the data is elsewhere.
What this comparison leaves out
Gemini in Google Workspace. There the licensing question is usually already settled, because Gemini comes in the package; on 6 September 2026 the Polish Google Workspace price list gave dollar prices billed monthly: Business Starter $7, Standard $14, Plus $22 per user. The data questions apply just the same.
GitHub Copilot. A developers’ tool, a different decision and a different article.
Consumer accounts as company strategy. Plus, Pro and Max on a company card are not an option in this comparison — they are the problem it exists to solve.
Providers’ productivity statistics. We leave those out deliberately: figures of the “X hours a month per employee” sort come from marketing material, with no method you could repeat in your own firm. The only number worth trusting is the one from your pilot.
How to settle this in your own firm in a month
- Write down who uses which accounts today — personal ones included. That is a list of risks, not of culprits.
- If you have Microsoft 365, check the bundle price, not the add-on: €8.23 per person today against €15.60 or €18.20.
- Buy 5 seats of one tool for a month, with one measured task per person and a stop rule written down before the start.
- After the month, note the tasks still done by hand between systems. That is the list of candidates for implementation, not for more licences.
- Before buying for everyone, settle region and training in the terms of the specific plan.
- Work it out over 12 months at today’s rate and write the date on it. In six months that number will be different.
What next
What a project looks like when the list from point 4 is not empty — an audit of what you already have, a pilot on one process, the implementation and the handover to your team — is set out on our page on AI implementation for your company. Tool training is the last stage of it, not a separate service.
Tell us who uses AI in your firm today, and what for. We will tell you where we would start — including when the answer is “a licence for five people is enough”.