Microsoft 365 Copilot alternatives at a glance
Five alternatives compared with Microsoft 365 Copilot on nine criteria.
Comparison as of September 19, 2026
| Criteria | Microsoft 365 Copilot (baseline) | Tricky Wombat | Glean | Gemini Enterprise | ChatGPT Enterprise | Atlassian Rovo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Companies already on Microsoft 365 | Teams with complex questions whose answers are spread across many sources | Large enterprises that want one search layer across hundreds of apps | Companies that run on Google Workspace | Teams whose staff already work in ChatGPT | Teams that run on Jira and Confluence |
| Rollout scope | Per user. No seat minimum since January 2024. Requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan | Project by project, from a single team. Runs alongside existing search tools | Organization-wide. Minimum often 100 to 250 users (Vendr) | Per seat. Business edition covers 1 to 500 users in Google's editions doc, "teams up to 300" in its FAQ. Standard and Plus from 1 user | Per seat, sold through sales. No Enterprise seat minimum published. ChatGPT Business starts at 2 users | Included with Standard, Premium and Enterprise Cloud plans of Jira, Confluence and Jira Service Management. No standalone purchase |
| Deployment time | Up to 24 hours for Copilot to appear after licenses are assigned, following data-readiness steps (Microsoft Learn) | Real time, as documents are uploaded | 4 to 5 weeks to first value for mid-sized companies (Glean Community) | "No IT setup needed" for Business edition, per Google. No timeline published for Standard and Plus | No timeline published. Apps are off by default on Enterprise until an admin turns them on | No timeline published. An admin activates Rovo for the site |
| Contract terms | Annual commitment, billed monthly or yearly. No trial for Microsoft 365 Copilot | Monthly or annual. Enterprise: annual, begins with a 14-day pilot | Annual standard, 2 to 3 year terms common (Vendr) | Billed per seat, per month. 30-day free trial on Business, Standard and Plus. Pay-as-you-go edition available | Enterprise: annual billing. Business: monthly or annual | Follows your Atlassian Cloud subscription, monthly or annual. Trial through a Jira or Confluence plan trial |
| Support model | Microsoft 365 admin support. FastTrack deployment guidance at 150+ licenses | Email with 2-business-day response (Starter) up to 1-hour response and a shared Slack channel (Enterprise). Onboarding by the engineers who built the product | Support assistant for all users, tickets for designated support contacts, and email | Google Cloud Customer Care. P1 first response 1 hour on Enhanced, 15 minutes on Premium. Business edition has its own help center, Workspace support for billing | 24/7 priority support and SLAs on Enterprise, per OpenAI | Follows your Atlassian Cloud plan. Premium: 24/7 support with one-hour response times for the most urgent issues |
| Integration depth | Native Microsoft 365 data plus 100+ prebuilt connectors, including Google Drive, Confluence and Box (preview) | Confluence, Google Drive, Dropbox, Asana and file shares. Reads 1,000+ file formats | 250+ connectors | Native Google Workspace data plus 100+ third-party connectors in Google's docs, including SharePoint, Confluence, Box, iManage and NetDocuments | Apps for Microsoft 365, Google Drive, Slack, GitHub and others. Custom connectors through MCP | Atlassian apps plus 50+ listed connectors, including Google Drive, SharePoint, Box and Slack |
| Vertical specialization | Horizontal, Microsoft 365 customers | Mid-market professional and knowledge services | Horizontal, large enterprise | Horizontal, Google Workspace customers | Horizontal | Software, IT and business teams on Atlassian |
| AI capabilities | Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Researcher and Analyst agents. Custom agents | Seven-step context pipeline before any model answers. All models on every plan. No training on customer data | Glean Agents, model choice through Model Hub | Gemini models, Deep Research, no-code agent building. Third-party agents on Standard and Plus | Company knowledge, powered by a version of GPT-5 trained to search across sources. No training on business data by default | Rovo Search, Chat, Agents, Studio and Deep Research |
| How answers are assembled | Microsoft Graph and semantic index, limited to what each user can access | Patent-pending clustering algorithm: groups related passages from every source, then selects the context before a model answers | Enterprise knowledge graph across connected apps (Futurum) | Indexed or federated search across connected sources, with identity mapping for source permissions | Searches connected apps, with some sources synced in advance. Cites sources and respects existing permissions | Teamwork Graph links people, work and goals. Synced connectors index content, direct connectors search it live |
Sources for every cell are listed at the end of this page.
Test it on the messy stuff
Every vendor demo runs on data the vendor chose. Your data has duplicate files, stale drafts and three versions of the same rate card. Accuracy on that data is the only number that predicts whether people keep using the tool after month two.
Where you run the test matters as much as what you ask. Microsoft does not offer a trial of Microsoft 365 Copilot, so a Copilot test runs on licenses you have bought for your own tenant. A Tricky Wombat pilot runs on your live data, with no fee for 14 days.
Run the same test on your two finalists:
- Collect 10 questions your staff asked in the last month. Include at least 3 that need facts from more than one source.
- Connect the same sources to both tools with the same permissions.
- Score every answer as correct and cited, correct but uncited, wrong, or no answer.
- Count confident wrong answers on their own line. A confident wrong answer costs more than no answer, because someone acts on it.
Tricky Wombat publishes the seven points where retrieval pipelines fail (opens in a new tab). Use the list as a scoring checklist for any vendor, including this one.
Why do companies look for a Microsoft 365 Copilot alternative?
Most companies that compare Copilot with other tools are not leaving Microsoft 365. They want answers from knowledge that lives somewhere else, or they want a tool shaped for one kind of work.
The first reason is where documents live. Copilot is strongest on content inside your Microsoft 365 tenant. A company that writes in Google Docs and stores files in Google Drive gets its closest fit from Gemini Enterprise. An engineering or IT organization that plans in Jira and documents in Confluence gets it from Atlassian Rovo.
The second is where people already work. If half your staff open ChatGPT before they open Outlook, ChatGPT Enterprise brings company knowledge into the tool they use.
The third is breadth. A company with hundreds of SaaS apps may want one search layer that treats Microsoft 365 as one source among many. That points to Glean.
The fourth is the single project. A consulting engagement, a deal or a matter has its own documents, its own people and its own hard questions. Some firms want a second tool for that project, next to Copilot, without changing the company-wide setup. That is where Tricky Wombat fits.
Is Tricky Wombat right for you?
Tricky Wombat is built for firms where the answer to one client question often sits in three places: a proposal in Sales, a method in Delivery and a contract clause in Legal. Retrieving the closest-matching document is the easy part. Assembling the right context from all three is where answers go wrong. Tricky Wombat runs every question through a seven-step pipeline (query rewriting, GraphRAG, semantic analysis, clustering, reranking, statistical document selection and statistical chunking) before a model writes a word. The design follows one thesis: answer quality depends far more on the context a model receives than on which model you choose.
See how the seven-step pipeline works → (opens in a new tab)
The rollout matches how professional firms work. You deploy Tricky Wombat one project at a time, next to Copilot or any other search tool you already use. It connects to Confluence, Google Drive, Dropbox, Asana and file shares, and reads more than 1,000 file types. A project is up and answering questions as soon as your documents are uploaded, and the engineers who built the pipeline run onboarding themselves, with no implementation partner in between.
Tricky Wombat is the wrong pick in two cases. If you want one assistant that runs inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams for every employee, Copilot is built for that, and a company-wide rollout of any kind is not how Tricky Wombat deploys. And the company runs a deliberately small, invite-only onboarding queue, so you may wait for a slot.
Choose it over Copilot if your hardest questions draw on sources outside Microsoft 365, you want to start with one project instead of the whole company, and you want a pilot on your own data before you sign an annual contract.
Which other Microsoft 365 Copilot alternative fits your team?
Each of these four wins a different situation. Pick the card that sounds like your company.
Glean: best for large enterprises that want one search layer across hundreds of apps
Glean wins on breadth. It lists more than 250 connectors, and it builds an enterprise knowledge graph across the apps you connect, according to Futurum. Teams build their own agents with Glean Agents and choose models through Glean's Model Hub.
Glean is sold as a company-wide platform. Vendr reports minimums that often start at 100 to 250 users, with annual contracts and 2 to 3 year terms common. Plan for a rollout that covers several departments at once.
Choose it over Copilot if your knowledge is split across dozens of SaaS apps and you want one search layer that treats Microsoft 365 as one source among many. For a closer look at Glean's own alternatives, see Glean alternatives (opens in a new tab).
Gemini Enterprise: best for companies that run on Google Workspace
Gemini Enterprise is Google's workplace AI app. Google's Agentspace product page now redirects to it. It reads Drive, Gmail, Calendar and Groups natively, and Google's docs list more than 100 third-party connectors, including SharePoint, Confluence, Box, iManage and NetDocuments. Staff get Deep Research and a no-code agent builder, and the Standard and Plus editions add third-party agents.
Google offers a 30-day free trial on the Business, Standard and Plus editions. Each connector either indexes content or searches it live. Google's docs say indexing gives higher search quality, while live federated search saves storage. Ask which mode each of your sources will use.
Choose it over Copilot if your company writes in Google Docs and stores files in Google Drive.
ChatGPT Enterprise: best for teams whose staff already work in ChatGPT
ChatGPT Enterprise wins on habit. Its company knowledge feature, launched in October 2025, searches connected apps such as Slack, SharePoint, Google Drive and GitHub, cites every source and shows each user only what that user can already open. OpenAI says the feature runs on a version of GPT-5 trained to look across multiple sources. Admins can sync Google Drive, SharePoint and Teams in advance, and teams can add their own connectors through the Model Context Protocol.
Apps are off by default on Enterprise until an admin enables them, and sync availability depends on your data residency region. Check both for each source during setup.
Choose it over Copilot if your staff already reach for ChatGPT first and you want company knowledge inside that tool.
Atlassian Rovo: best for teams that run on Jira and Confluence
Rovo comes with Standard, Premium and Enterprise Cloud plans of Jira, Confluence and Jira Service Management, so Atlassian customers do not buy it separately. It runs on the Teamwork Graph, which links people, work and goals. Rovo Studio, generally available since May 2026, lets teams build agents and automations without code.
Rovo requires a paid Atlassian Cloud plan, and usage draws on a monthly credit pool shared across the organization. If most of your knowledge sits outside Atlassian, confirm a connector exists for each source.
Choose it over Copilot if your projects are planned in Jira and documented in Confluence.
Can you run Tricky Wombat alongside Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Yes. Tricky Wombat does not ask you to replace anything. Copilot keeps drafting email in Outlook, summarizing Teams calls and building decks in PowerPoint for everyone in the company. Tricky Wombat covers one project at a time, with only the sources that project uses and only the people on it.
The split works because the two jobs differ. Copilot answers questions about the work in your tenant: what did the client say in Tuesday's call, where is the latest version of the deck. A client engagement asks harder questions whose answers sit in several systems, many of them outside Microsoft 365.
Take a 900-person advisory firm that runs on Microsoft 365. It wins a six-month operating-model engagement. The client shares its documents through a Google Drive folder, the firm's delivery methods live in Confluence, and ten years of proposals sit on a file share. Twelve people staff the project. Their hardest question on day three is: "What did we recommend to similar clients in 2024, how did Delivery scope that work, and which contract terms did Legal reject?" The answer draws on a proposal, a method page and a contract, in three systems.
The firm connects those three sources to a Tricky Wombat deployment and gives access to the twelve people on the engagement. Tricky Wombat is answering their questions as soon as the documents are uploaded. The client's files stay inside a deployment only the project team can reach. Existing access rights stay intact for every question, and every answer cites the material it came from. Its Microsoft 365 setup stays as it was.
Teams inside larger companies use the same approach, which is why Tricky Wombat for small teams (opens in a new tab) runs on the same pipeline as the enterprise product (opens in a new tab).
How quickly can you start getting answers?
Microsoft says Copilot takes up to 24 hours to appear once licenses are assigned, and its setup guide lists readiness work first: reviewing overshared SharePoint sites, restricting sensitive content and turning on audit. Mid-sized companies see first value from Glean in four to five weeks, according to the Glean Community. Google describes Gemini Enterprise Business edition as needing no IT setup. OpenAI and Atlassian do not publish a timeline. With Tricky Wombat, you are asking questions as soon as your documents are uploaded.
Connecting files is the quick part. Getting answers your team trusts takes tuning. Before you sign, ask each vendor who does the tuning, how much of your team's time it takes, and how you will measure success at the end of the pilot.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Microsoft 365 Copilot alternative?
The best alternative depends on where your knowledge lives. Glean fits companies with hundreds of apps. Gemini Enterprise fits Google Workspace companies. ChatGPT Enterprise fits teams already in ChatGPT. Atlassian Rovo fits Jira and Confluence teams. Tricky Wombat fits teams with complex questions whose answers are spread across many sources.
Can you use Tricky Wombat and Microsoft 365 Copilot at the same time?
Yes. Tricky Wombat deploys one project at a time and connects only the sources that project uses. Copilot keeps working inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams for the whole company, while Tricky Wombat answers the project team's questions whose answers are spread across Google Drive, Confluence, file shares and other sources.
Is GitHub Copilot the same as Microsoft 365 Copilot?
No. GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant that works in code editors, the command line and on GitHub, and GitHub sells it through its own plans. Microsoft 365 Copilot works inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams and requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan. The two share a name and a parent company.
Is Glean better than Copilot?
It depends on where your documents live. If most of your knowledge sits in SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams, Copilot is already inside those apps. If it is spread across dozens of SaaS tools, Glean's 250+ connectors and knowledge graph fit better. Glean is sold company-wide, often from 100 users, per Vendr.
Does Microsoft 365 Copilot search Google Drive or Confluence?
Yes, through Copilot connectors. Microsoft lists connectors for Google Drive, Confluence Cloud, Confluence on-premises and Box, the last in preview. An admin sets up each connector. For practice-management or document-management systems, check Microsoft's connectors gallery for your specific product before you buy.
Is Gemini Enterprise the same as Google Agentspace?
Google's Agentspace product page now redirects to Gemini Enterprise, which Google launched in October 2025 as its workplace AI app. Gemini Enterprise searches Google Workspace and more than 100 third-party sources and lets staff build agents without code. It comes in Business, Standard, Plus, Pay-as-you-go and Frontline editions.
When should you start evaluating a Microsoft 365 Copilot alternative?
Start at least 90 days before your Copilot renewal, because Microsoft sells Copilot on an annual commitment. A 14-day pilot on your own data, plus two to four weeks of procurement and security review, fits inside that window. Running the pilot next to Copilot gives you a direct comparison on the same questions.
How was this comparison researched?
Every competitor fact on this page comes from a public source listed below: vendor websites, documentation and help centers, Microsoft Learn, Google Cloud documentation, the OpenAI Help Center, Atlassian Support, Vendr, Futurum and the Glean Community. All facts were verified on September 19, 2026 and are re-checked every quarter. Send corrections to info@trickywombat.ai.
Bring your messy stuff
Pick one project. Bring 10 real questions and your worst folders, and connect the sources that project uses. Tricky Wombat runs the pilot on your live data, next to Copilot and the other tools you already have, and scores the answers with you. You can end the pilot at any point during the 14 days with no fee and no contract.
Book a 20-minute fit call (opens in a new tab) | See how enterprise search works (opens in a new tab)
Product names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used here for identification only. No vendor on this page endorses Tricky Wombat. Competitor information comes from the public sources below, verified September 19, 2026. Features and terms change, so confirm current details with each vendor.
Sources
- Microsoft 365 Copilot paid seats: Microsoft FY26 Q4 earnings release, July 29, 2026 (opens in a new tab)
- Microsoft 365 Copilot commitment, trial, features and connector count: Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise (opens in a new tab). Qualifying plans: Microsoft Learn, licensing (opens in a new tab). Seat minimum removal: Microsoft, Jan 15, 2024 (opens in a new tab)
- Microsoft 365 Copilot setup time and readiness steps: Microsoft Learn, Copilot setup (opens in a new tab)
- Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors: Prebuilt connectors (opens in a new tab). Microsoft-built connectors gallery (opens in a new tab)
- Microsoft 365 Copilot grounding: Semantic index (opens in a new tab). Support: FastTrack eligibility (opens in a new tab)
- GitHub Copilot: GitHub Docs, What is GitHub Copilot? (opens in a new tab)
- Glean seat minimums and contract terms: Vendr (opens in a new tab)
- Glean connectors, agents and Model Hub: Glean press release, May 28, 2026 (opens in a new tab). Knowledge graph: Futurum, Apr 3, 2026 (opens in a new tab)
- Glean deployment time: Glean Community, Apr 24, 2026 (opens in a new tab). Support: Glean support center (opens in a new tab)
- Gemini Enterprise editions, trials, billing, native connectors and agents: Gemini Enterprise FAQ (opens in a new tab). Compare editions (opens in a new tab). Launch: Google Cloud blog, Oct 9, 2025 (opens in a new tab). Agentspace redirect: cloud.google.com/products/agentspace (opens in a new tab)
- Gemini Enterprise connectors, indexing and federation: Introduction to connectors and data stores (opens in a new tab). Release notes (opens in a new tab). Overview: What is Gemini Enterprise? (opens in a new tab)
- ChatGPT company knowledge: OpenAI, Oct 23, 2025 (opens in a new tab)
- ChatGPT Enterprise and Business seats, billing, support and data use: ChatGPT business pricing (opens in a new tab). Apps and MCP: OpenAI Help Center, apps in ChatGPT (opens in a new tab). Sync: OpenAI Help Center, apps with sync (opens in a new tab)
- Atlassian Rovo plans and features: Rovo (opens in a new tab). Rovo features (opens in a new tab). Rovo licensing and credits (opens in a new tab). Connectors: Available Rovo connectors (opens in a new tab). Connector types (opens in a new tab)
- Atlassian Rovo activation: Atlassian Support (opens in a new tab). Rovo Studio: Atlassian, May 6, 2026 (opens in a new tab). Billing: Monthly and annual subscriptions (opens in a new tab). Support: Atlassian Cloud Premium (opens in a new tab)
- Tricky Wombat deployment, support and plans: /price (opens in a new tab), /enterprise-search (opens in a new tab)
- Google Cloud Customer Care, Google Workspace Help: Get support for Gemini Enterprise (opens in a new tab)