Forgeron3 or Microsoft Copilot: which one for an SME?

Microsoft 365 Copilot is the AI assistant built into the Microsoft 365 apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. For businesses with fewer than 300 users, Microsoft sells it as Copilot Business, as an add-on to a Microsoft 365 Business subscription or in offers that combine the suite and Copilot. Copilot Studio lets you build agents in it.

Copilot is not an AI model. It is an assistant that relies on models from OpenAI and Anthropic and brings together your Microsoft documents, email and meetings. Forgeron3 does the same joining-up work on a platform that is independent of your office suite, Microsoft or Google, with a per-user price and hosting in France.

Copilot works in the apps teams already open: it drafts in Word, analyses and charts in Excel, sorts email and manages the calendar in Outlook, and recaps Teams meetings with the actions to take. Copilot Studio, included with the licence for internal agents, lets you build your own agents, trigger them on a schedule and connect them to MCP servers. Microsoft does not reuse customer data to train its models, and processes European customers’ data within the EU Data Boundary, except for Anthropic models.

Copilot Business cannot be bought on its own. It is an add-on at €21.84 excl. VAT per user per month on monthly billing, or €18.20 excl. VAT on annual billing, which requires a Microsoft 365 Business licence. The Business Standard with Copilot offer, which combines the two, costs €24.43 excl. VAT per month on monthly billing. Forgeron3 costs €12 excl. VAT on Apprentice, with no prerequisite, and connects to Google as well as Microsoft.

Putting a Copilot agent on a website or in front of customers requires a separate Copilot Studio licence, and an agent reachable by phone needs an Azure Communication Services number. At Forgeron3, embedding via iframe or link is included from Apprentice, and a phone number for an assistant is coming soon, as an option.