AI Pricing Comparison 2026: Copilot vs ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini
Every vendor publishes a price per seat. None of them publishes what a job costs. Here are the verified list prices, the caps sitting behind them, and what a 10-person team actually pays per year.
Business AI pricing converged in 2026. ChatGPT Business and Claude Team both land on $20 per user per month. Microsoft 365 Copilot sits at $18 on promotion. Google gave up on selling Gemini separately and folded it into Workspace. On headline price the four are now within a few dollars of each other, which means the interesting question is no longer which is cheapest — it's what the price actually buys, and how much of it you're paying for twice.
The list prices, verified
All figures below were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 17 August 2026, in US dollars. Secondary sources disagree with each other on several of these — we checked the vendors directly, and note where a price is promotional or has a prerequisite attached.
| Plan | Annual | Monthly | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 Copilot Business (add-on) | $18.00 | $25.20 | Promotional through 30 Sept 2026, then $21.00. Requires a separate qualifying Microsoft 365 plan underneath. |
| M365 Business Standard with Copilot | $23.50 | $28.20 | Bundle — includes the Office apps, so no second licence needed. |
| M365 Business Premium with Copilot | $32.00 | $38.40 | Adds the Premium security and device-management tier. |
| ChatGPT Business | $20.00 | $25.00 | 2-seat minimum. Cut from $25/$30 on 2 April 2026. |
| ChatGPT Enterprise | Quote only | Not published. Market reports cluster around $45–75 per seat with a reported 150-seat minimum and annual prepayment. | |
| Claude Team (standard seat) | $20.00 | $25.00 | 2–150 users. Includes Claude Code. |
| Claude Team (premium seat) | $100.00 | $125.00 | Same features, materially more usage headroom. |
| Google Workspace Business Starter | $7.00 | ~$8.40 | Gemini included but limited — side-panel access with capped prompts. |
| Google Workspace Business Standard | $14.00 | ~$16.80 | Full Gemini across Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet. Also an entire office suite. |
| Google Workspace Business Plus | $22.00 | ~$26.40 | Adds expanded Gemini Notebook access and higher storage. |
| Quiriz Pro | $215.88 / year | $19.99 | Not per seat. One workspace subscription; team access and Slack included. |
A live example of why you should check the vendor page. Two widely-cited pricing roundups list Google Workspace at $9.20 / $18.40 / $28.70 per user per month in US dollars. Those are the Canadian prices. Google's own US page reads $7.00 / $14.00 / $22.00 and says "All prices $USD" underneath. If you are budgeting from a blog post, you may be over-forecasting Workspace by around 30%.
What the price actually buys
Per-seat price is the number vendors compete on. Usage caps are the number that decides whether the tool survives contact with real work. These are documented limits, not opinions:
- Google Gemini — 500 interactions per user per month. Roughly 25 per working day. Fine for most people; a hard wall for anyone who actually leans on it. Gemini's analysis quality also degrades on sheets beyond a few hundred rows.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot — a 2 million cell ceiling for analysis in Excel, effectively single-table, and it reasons over "relevant sections" of a workbook rather than all of it.
- ChatGPT Projects — file caps by tier (5 / 25 / 40 files, 10 per upload). A folder of monthly exports hits this quickly.
- Claude Projects — a 200K-token context window, past which it retrieves excerpts rather than reading everything. Claude Code adds two separate quota layers: a rolling 5-hour window and a weekly cycle.
Note what these have in common. Every one of them is a limit on how much data the assistant will look at. None of the four is priced or engineered around "a team keeps asking questions of the same growing dataset."
The real bill: a 10-person team
List price × 10 × 12, annual billing, cheapest route to giving all ten people AI:
Annual cost, 10 users
| Option | Per user / mo | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Google Workspace Business Standard (Gemini included) | $14.00 | $1,680 |
| M365 Copilot Business add-on (+ required M365 licence) | $18.00 + | $2,160 + |
| ChatGPT Business | $20.00 | $2,400 |
| Claude Team | $20.00 | $2,400 |
| M365 Business Standard with Copilot | $23.50 | $2,820 |
| M365 Business Premium with Copilot | $32.00 | $3,840 |
| Quiriz Pro (whole workspace) | — | $215.88 |
Annual billing, US list prices as of 17 Aug 2026. The Copilot add-on row is understated — it cannot be bought on its own, so add the underlying Microsoft 365 licence to get a true figure.
These are not substitutes, and we're not pretending they are
Workspace at $14 buys email, calendar, storage and the entire Docs suite — Gemini is thrown in. Copilot works inside Excel, Word and Outlook on whatever file you happen to have open. ChatGPT and Claude are general assistants that write, code, research and reason across every task you bring them. Quiriz does one narrow thing: it answers questions about datasets you have loaded and governed.
Nobody replaces a Microsoft 365 or Workspace subscription with a data-analysis tool, and the per-seat products are not overpriced for what they do. The comparison below is deliberately narrower than "which AI should we buy."
The thing per-seat pricing gets wrong
All four vendors charge per person, every month, regardless of use. That model is well matched to a tool everyone opens daily — a mailbox, a word processor, a general assistant.
It fits badly when the capability is "our team can ask questions about our data." On most teams that demand is lumpy: two or three people ask constantly, and everyone else asks a handful of times a month — before a board meeting, when a client queries an invoice, when a number in a deck looks wrong. Under per-seat pricing you either buy seats for the occasional askers and pay full freight for near-zero use, or you don't, and those questions route back through the two people who do have seats. That is the reporting bottleneck the tool was supposed to remove.
The pricing question worth asking is not "what does a seat cost?" but "what does one answer cost, and who is allowed to ask?" No vendor in this comparison publishes the first number, and all four answer the second with "whoever you bought a licence for."
A third pricing model
There is a structural alternative to both per-seat and per-token pricing: charge for the workspace and let the whole team ask.
That is how Quiriz is priced — Pro is $19.99 a month for the workspace, not per person, with Slack and team sharing included. It is possible because the underlying economics are small: a governed question compiles to SQL and runs against your data, and the model sees schema and snippets rather than your whole dataset. An answer costs roughly $0.003 and a generated report roughly $0.03. At that cost, metering individual askers would cost more to administer than it recovers, so we don't.
The honest trade is scope. Quiriz will not draft your email, write your code or summarise a PDF. It answers questions about your data, the same way twice, for everyone on the team. If you need a general assistant, you still need a general assistant — see our breakdowns of ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini for where each one stops.
What to watch for the rest of 2026
- The Copilot promotion expires 30 September 2026, taking the add-on from $18.00 to $21.00 — a 17% rise for anyone who budgeted on the promo rate.
- Free tiers are acquisition subsidies. Google stopped serving Gemini CLI requests free on 18 June 2026; the replacement free ceiling is reported in the low tens of requests per day, down from roughly 1,000. Assume any free tier in this market has an expiry date.
- Price cuts are happening. OpenAI cut ChatGPT Business from $25 to $20 annual on 2 April 2026. Competition on headline seat price is real — competition on caps is not.
Sources
- Microsoft, Microsoft 365 Copilot for business pricing — add-on and bundled plan prices, promotional end date, licence prerequisite.
- Anthropic, Claude pricing — Pro, Max, Team standard and premium seats, Enterprise.
- Google, Google Workspace pricing — US list prices, "All prices $USD".
- OpenAI ChatGPT Business and Enterprise pricing — Business at $20/$25 with a 2-seat minimum following the 2 April 2026 reduction; Enterprise is quote-only and the $45–75 range reflects reported market deals, not published pricing.
- Quiriz pricing — Free, Plus, Pro and Max, priced per workspace.
Prices verified against vendor pages on 17 August 2026, in US dollars, and change frequently — check the vendor before you budget. Monthly Workspace figures marked "~" are the standard flexible-billing uplift on the published annual rate. Usage caps are drawn from vendor documentation and published limits current at the time of writing. ChatGPT Enterprise pricing is not published by OpenAI; figures shown are reported market ranges and should be treated as indicative only.