Microsoft Copilot Studio: What you can build, what it costs and how to start

Plans, prices and features checked on the official pages on October 24, 2026.

Microsoft Copilot Studio is a low-code web studio for building, publishing and managing AI agents and workflows. You sign in at copilotstudio.microsoft.com, describe what the agent should do, connect knowledge and tools, and publish it to Teams, Microsoft Copilot, a website or other channels. Usage is billed in Copilot Credits, and an individual trial lets you build and test but not publish.

What Copilot Studio is and who it is for

Microsoft’s documentation describes Copilot Studio as a graphical, low-code studio for building and managing agents, workflows and agent flows across a business. Microsoft says it is built so people without a deep technical background can make useful solutions, while professional makers still get depth.

The product page is aimed at organizations, especially large ones, and gives example uses such as balance sheet reconciliation in finance, recruitment screening in HR, ticket triage in IT and contract review in legal. Microsoft claims that 90% of the Fortune 500 has used Copilot Studio.

Access is through the standalone web app. Microsoft lists Chrome 91, Firefox 89 and Safari 16.4 or newer as the supported browsers.

What you can build: Agents, workflows and agent flows

The documentation names three building blocks. You can use them alone or combine them, for example a workflow that calls an agent for one step.

• Agents: AI assistants that follow your instructions, draw on connected knowledge sources and use tools to take action. They can work in multiple languages across Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Copilot, websites and mobile apps. You can create one by describing it in plain language.
• Workflows: automations made in a drag-and-drop designer, where each step can reason and act. Microsoft says they include built-in testing and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Agent flows: the established flow format, with an authoring experience similar to Power Automate. They run standalone or attach to an agent as a tool, and can include human review steps.

Microsoft also lists an app creation experience and build-with-natural-language, both still marked as preview in the documentation.

The three harnesses decide how an agent works and is billed

Everything you build runs on a harness, the runtime between your design and the model. Microsoft says the choice affects how the agent reasons, what it can do out of the box and how it is billed.

Microsoft notes that the GitHub Copilot harness is a Copilot Studio framework, not the GitHub Copilot service, and says customer data is not sent to that service when agents run in Copilot Studio.

Key features beyond building

According to the product page, agents can connect to data and systems through more than 1,500 prebuilt connectors and MCP servers. You can pick a model from defaults, custom models or the 11,000+ available through Azure AI Foundry.

For running agents in production, Microsoft lists real-time analytics, structured evaluations with test sets, a Dev-Test-Prod lifecycle with version control and approval gates, and security through Microsoft Entra ID, Defender and conditional access. Admins can set AI credit budgets and usage limits, and send audit logs to Microsoft Purview.

Plans and pricing: Copilot Credits, packs and pay-as-you-go

Since September 1, 2025, the common currency is Copilot Credits rather than messages, according to Microsoft. There is no separate per-seat price for building: the cost comes from the credits agents use.

Prices checked on October 24, 2026. Microsoft says credit packs and pay-as-you-go have the same features and differ only in how you pay. Regional prices differ, so check the pricing page for your currency.

What a credit buys

For standard harness agents, Microsoft’s billing-rate table lists:

• Classic answer: 1 credit
• Generative answer: 2 credits
• Agent action: 5 credits
• Tenant graph grounding for messages: 10 credits
• Agent flow actions: 13 credits per 100 actions
• Voice: 10, 35 or 75 credits per minute depending on tier

One reply can combine several. Microsoft’s example is a grounded agent using 12 credits for one complex prompt: 10 for grounding and 2 for the generative answer. Microsoft also offers an agent usage estimator to forecast volumes.

Overage

Enforcement starts when a tenant reaches 125% of prepaid capacity, at which point custom agents are disabled and new conversations are rejected until capacity is raised or reset. Admins can cap credits per agent in the Power Platform admin center, or link pay-as-you-go to avoid enforcement.

User licenses: Who needs one and who does not

To create and manage agents, Microsoft says you need a Copilot Studio User License for each maker, plus a tenant license that the admin buys and cannot assign to individuals. Per the billing documentation, the user license is free of charge but requires a prepaid credit pack subscription first. Other routes into the studio are the Copilot Studio authors role in the Power Platform admin center, a Microsoft 365 Copilot license or the trial.

People who chat with a published agent do not need a special license, and guest users of your tenant cannot access Copilot Studio. Admins assign licenses in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Users, then Active users, then Manage product licenses, and can use an Entra ID security group to simplify this.

Microsoft also describes a Teams plan inside select Microsoft 365 subscriptions. It supports classic orchestration and publishing to Teams only, with no generative orchestration or premium connectors.

How to start: Trial, first agent and publishing

1. Open copilotstudio.microsoft.com and sign in, or use the sign-up page to start a trial.
2. On the Home page, describe the agent in up to 1,024 characters. The AI generates a name, description and instructions, and suggests knowledge, tools and channels.
3. Add a knowledge source, such as a website URL or documents.
4. Test in the test chat panel, change the instructions, and test again.
5. Edit the introductory message in the Conversation Start topic.
6. Select Publish. Microsoft’s quickstart then publishes to a demo website you can share. This step needs a license that allows publishing.

Microsoft’s quickstart also mentions turning off the New experience toggle to reach the standard harness Home page it describes.

Trial rules

The trial starts when you finish sign-up. When it expires you can extend it by 30 days, and your agent keeps working for up to 90 days after expiry. You cannot publish during the trial. Microsoft notes that a personal email address may be rejected; use a work or school account. If sign-up fails, the admin may have disabled self-service sign-up.

Admins can switch off these self-service (viral) trials with Microsoft Entra settings and Graph PowerShell, and can disable self-service purchase per product.

Limits and things to know before you commit

• Credit use varies with agent design and traffic, so a busy public agent can cost far more than an internal one. Estimate before launch.
• Models you bring yourself, including Azure Foundry models, are billed separately from Copilot Credits.
• Computer-using agents are billed at the agent action rate and are not included in the Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
• Employee-facing use by Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed users is included at no charge for several features, subject to fair usage limits that Microsoft says it may update.
• Copilot Studio is not intended as a medical device and does not support emergency calls, according to Microsoft.

Copilot Studio compared with Microsoft Copilot and other options

Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat) is the assistant people use. Copilot Studio is where you build custom agents for it and for other channels. Microsoft’s pricing FAQ says the Microsoft 365 route covers internal agents on the Copilot Chat and Standard harnesses, while the standalone license adds the GitHub Copilot harness, external channels, use by unlicensed users and more payment options.

Agent Builder is a lighter tool inside Microsoft Copilot for quickly making lightweight agents, aimed at business users and small teams. For background on the consumer side, see our piece on what the free app and paid Microsoft 365 plans cost now, our look at the Microsoft agent store, and a report on Volkswagen’s Copilot rollout.

Common questions