Grengin vs.
Microsoft 365 Copilot

Multi-model AI in your own cloud account. No Microsoft tax. No per-seat math. Five-minute VM.

Executive Summary

Microsoft 365 Copilot is one of the most ambitious enterprise AI deployments in software history. Embedded into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, grounded in your tenant's Microsoft Graph, governed through Microsoft Purview, and priced at $30 per user per month for the Enterprise SKU (or $18–$21 for the Business SKU through June 30, 2026), Copilot is a category-defining product for organizations whose digital lives already run on Microsoft.

But Copilot is not an AI platform. It is a Microsoft 365 feature. To get the full experience, you need a qualifying base license (Business Standard, Business Premium, E3, or E5), an Entra ID tenant, OneDrive, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and a Microsoft-shaped data estate. You get one model family (OpenAI inside Azure, with Anthropic models being added selectively), one ecosystem, and one bill that grows by $360/user/year on top of whatever you already pay Microsoft.

Grengin is the opposite shape. It is open-source software you deploy as a VM in your own AWS or Azure account. The VM image is metered at $0.001 per vCPU-hour—pennies per day for a typical deployment—and the software itself is open source, so if you'd rather self-host from source, you can. There is no per-seat pricing. There is no required base license. There is no productivity-suite prerequisite. There is no identity-provider prerequisite—Grengin works with any SAML 2.0 / OIDC IdP including Entra ID, Okta, Google Workspace, and Auth0. Your team gets multi-model access to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, Cerebras, and open-source models from one governed interface, deployed in roughly five minutes. Support contracts are optional and purchased separately on grengin.com.

If your team is Microsoft-native and your AI use cases live inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, Copilot's deep integration is hard to beat. If your team uses Google Workspace, Slack, Notion, Linear, or any non-Microsoft-default stack—or if you simply want AI that lives in your own cloud account without taking a deeper Microsoft licensing dependency—Grengin is the better fit.

At-a-Glance Comparison

Dimension Microsoft 365 Copilot Grengin
Best for Microsoft 365 E3/E5 customers; content creation in Office apps Mixed-stack and Google Workspace SMBs; cross-tool AI access
Software model Proprietary Open source
Where it runs Microsoft cloud only Your AWS or Azure account (Marketplace VM), or self-hosted from source
Models OpenAI via Azure (GPT family); selective Anthropic integration OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, Cerebras, open-source
Per-seat price Copilot Business: $18 (promo, annual, through Jun 30, 2026) / $21 standard; Copilot Enterprise: $30 None - no per-seat pricing
Software cost Bundled into per-seat fee $0 (open source)
Marketplace VM cost N/A $0.001 per vCPU-hour (≈ $3/month for a 4-vCPU VM running 24/7)
Required base license M365 Business Standard/Premium or E3/E5 None
Identity prerequisite Entra ID Any SAML 2.0 / OIDC IdP (including Entra ID)
Productivity-suite prerequisite OneDrive, Exchange, SharePoint, Teams None
Time to first user Microsoft tenant readiness + rollout (weeks) ~5 minutes from AWS / Azure Marketplace
Where Copilot lives Inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams + standalone Copilot Chat Standalone web/PWA app; API for integration
Grounding Microsoft Graph (your Microsoft 365 content) Customer-provided context; user file upload; roadmap RAG/connectors
Web grounding Bing search service Per-model defaults; configurable
No training on data Yes (Enterprise Data Protection) Yes (contractual with each LLM provider)
Data residency EU Data Boundary + Microsoft regional architecture Customer-selected AWS / Azure region; runs entirely in your tenant
HIPAA Supported for properly configured deployments via DPA + BAA BAA flows directly to your LLM provider; Grengin Inc. is not in the data path
DLP Microsoft Purview DLP for Copilot (GA, included) Built-in PII detection at prompt layer
Custom agents Microsoft Copilot Studio ($200/month + capacity packs) Roadmap: native agents (Phase 3)
Cost transparency $30/user/month, plus base licenses, plus Studio, plus Azure capacity for high-volume agents VM hourly + cloud compute + LLM at provider cost. No markups.
Support Bundled in Microsoft licensing Optional, purchased on grengin.com

Detailed Section-by-Section Comparison

Nine areas that matter for procurement, security, and day-to-day use. Jump to a topic or read in order.

Capabilities and Features

What end users actually get in the product.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Copilot's flagship value is in-context AI inside Microsoft 365 apps: "summarize this Word document," "build a chart from this Excel range," "draft this email in Outlook," "catch me up on this Teams meeting." It is grounded in your tenant's actual files, emails, and chats through Microsoft Graph, which means responses can be specific to your organization's data without uploading anything. The recent Work IQ layer adds an implicit understanding of relationships, projects, and workflow patterns. For Microsoft-native knowledge workers, this is genuinely transformative.

Grengin

Grengin's flagship value is a unified, governed AI workspace that works across every tool your team uses—whether or not Microsoft is part of the picture—running in your own cloud account. End users get a clean chat interface, multi-model switching mid-conversation, file upload, code execution, and prompt libraries. Administrators get audit logs, per-user usage caps, PII detection, real-time cost analytics by user/department/project, and SSO with any IdP.

If your work happens predominantly inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams, Copilot's deep integration is hard to beat. If your work spans Slack, Notion, Linear, Figma, Google Docs, Salesforce, HubSpot, Looker, Confluence—or if you want AI for use cases that aren't tied to a specific Office document—Grengin's standalone, multi-model approach is more flexible.

Model Choice and Flexibility

The largest functional difference between the two approaches.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Copilot runs on OpenAI models deployed in Azure (currently the GPT-4 / GPT-5 family, with the specific model evolving on Microsoft's release cadence). Microsoft has begun adding Anthropic models in selected workloads, but practical model choice for end users remains constrained to "the Microsoft default."

Grengin

Grengin is multi-model native. A user can start a conversation on Claude Sonnet for a long-document analysis, switch to GPT-5.5 to refine the output, ask Gemini Flash to translate it, and have Groq Llama generate quick variations—all in one thread, with one audit log and one bill. Model strengths diverge meaningfully across reasoning, context length, latency, price, and creative quality, and one-model-fits-all wastes money.

The two products solve different problems—Copilot optimizes in-app Microsoft work; Grengin optimizes cross-tool, multi-provider AI with governance in your own cloud.

Security and Compliance

Where SaaS certification vs. self-hosted control really diverges.

The structural difference here is worth being explicit about.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft brings world-class compliance infrastructure. Enterprise Data Protection (EDP) ensures Copilot prompts and responses are not used to train foundation models, are protected by Exchange/SharePoint-level commitments, and respect the EU Data Boundary (with documented exceptions for web search and certain Anthropic-model processing). Microsoft 365 Copilot supports HIPAA for properly configured deployments via the DPA and BAA, and inherits the full Microsoft 365 compliance stack (GDPR, ISO/IEC 27018, etc.). Microsoft Purview adds DLP for Copilot. All of this rests on Microsoft holding the relevant certifications as a SaaS vendor—which it does, comprehensively.

Grengin

Grengin is different because Grengin Inc. is not in the data path. The software is open source and you deploy it as a VM in your own AWS or Azure account. The application runs inside your existing security and compliance boundary: your KMS keys, your IAM policies, your network controls, your SIEM, your SOC 2 or ISO 27001 scope. The vendor-side certification question that dominates SaaS procurement is structurally minimized.

What your security team will still ask about

  • Your own infrastructure compliance extends to cover Grengin because Grengin runs inside it. This is usually a positive—your environment is already audited for the controls that matter.
  • The LLM provider's certifications apply for whichever provider actually processes prompt content. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others each publish SOC 2 / ISO / HIPAA posture. With Grengin, that relationship is direct (BYOK) or pass-through at provider rates. The BAA or DPA chain follows the data to that provider, not through Grengin Inc.
  • The code itself. Because Grengin is open source, your security team can audit it.

In practical terms: for organizations that have already standardized on Microsoft Purview and want one-throat-to-choke compliance, Copilot is the path of least resistance. For organizations that want a transparent, cloud-native, self-hosted option they can show to clients and auditors without taking a deeper Microsoft licensing dependency, Grengin is the cleaner fit.

Data Privacy and Sovereignty

Both commit to not training on your data; the structural difference is who sees it.

Both products commit, contractually and by default, to not training foundation models on your data. The structural difference is who sees the data:

  • With Copilot, all interactions traverse Microsoft's cloud. Grounding happens inside Microsoft Graph, which means Copilot only ever sees content the user is already entitled to under Microsoft's existing access controls. This is elegant—and it ties you tightly to Microsoft.
  • With Grengin, the application runs entirely inside your AWS or Azure account. The only data that leaves your VPC is the LLM API call to the provider you chose for that conversation. You can restrict the allowed providers per department, per user, or per content classification.

For multinational or compliance-sensitive teams that are not already standardized on Microsoft Purview, Grengin's "runs entirely in your cloud account" model is often the deciding factor.

Integrations and Connectors

Breadth of first-party connectors vs. API-first extensibility.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Copilot's grounding is Microsoft Graph: your SharePoint sites, OneDrive files, Outlook mail, Teams chats, Loop pages, and Planner tasks. Connectors to external systems exist (Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors and the broader Power Platform), and Copilot Studio lets you build custom agents—but agents and high-volume agent activity require a separate $200/month Copilot Studio license plus capacity packs.

Grengin

Grengin is API-first. Its current focus is the chat experience and the multi-LLM gateway; the roadmap (Phase 3, Q3–Q4 2026) adds Slack and Teams integrations, with selected CRM connectors. Teams that need broad enterprise search across non-Microsoft tools today often pair Grengin with a dedicated search/RAG product or wire Grengin into their existing knowledge platform via API.

If deep Microsoft Graph grounding on day one is your top criterion, Copilot leads. If you need equal footing for Google, Slack, and the rest of your stack, Grengin is built for that.

Customization and Extensibility

Framework customization vs. code you can own.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Copilot's extensibility runs through Microsoft Copilot Studio (declarative agents, custom actions via REST, plugins, and the Microsoft 365 agent SDK), plus Power Platform for workflow. It is powerful, mature, and Microsoft-shaped—everything you build extends Microsoft's footprint in your environment.

Grengin

Grengin is open source at the core, exposes a full REST API, supports per-role and per-department system prompts, and (on the roadmap) will add native agents. For organizations that want to build on top of their AI platform rather than rent further into a single vendor's stack, Grengin's foundation is more open.

Admin and Governance

Both offer admin consoles, RBAC, SSO, SCIM, and audit logs—the emphasis differs.

Both products provide RBAC, SSO, SCIM, audit logs, and DLP-style controls. The differences are characteristic:

How governance differs

  • Copilot's governance is identity- and content-centric. Microsoft Purview lets you label sensitivity, restrict grounding by label, prevent prompts containing sensitive information types from being processed, and audit interactions through DSPM Activity Explorer. The cost is that you must be on E3/E5 (or have specific Purview SKUs) and you must invest in the surrounding Purview deployment work.
  • Grengin's governance is economics- and prompt-centric. Per-user, per-department, and per-project cost analytics in real time; usage caps with hard or soft enforcement; PII detection at the prompt layer included on every deployment; audit logs exported to CSV/JSON; budget alerts at 50/75/90/100% of cap.

A common pattern: Microsoft-heavy customers run Copilot for in-Office AI and use Grengin for everything else (cross-stack AI access, cost governance, and non-Microsoft tools).

Pricing and TCO

Per-seat bundles vs. compute metering and provider-cost LLMs.

Sticker prices look comparable on the Copilot side. The total cost is not.

Component comparison

Component Microsoft 365 Copilot Grengin
Per-seat AI fee $30 / user / month $0 - no per-seat pricing
Required base license M365 E3 ($36) or E5 ($57) per user None
Software Bundled $0 (open source)
Marketplace VM N/A $0.001 per vCPU-hour
Cloud compute N/A (Microsoft hosts) Paid to AWS/Azure at standard rates
Custom agents Copilot Studio: $200/month base + capacity packs Included roadmap
Custom-model extensions Azure OpenAI consumption Native multi-model included
Effective floor for E3 + Copilot ~$66 / user / month Effectively zero per-user; you pay compute + LLM
Effective floor for E5 + Copilot ~$87 / user / month Effectively zero per-user; you pay compute + LLM

Worked example: 100-person mixed-stack company

  • Copilot path: Must first ensure all 100 users have M365 E3+. If they are already on E3, add $30 × 100 = $3,000/month for Copilot Enterprise = $36,000/year just for the Copilot add-on. Add Copilot Studio for two custom agents at $200/month = $2,400/year. Annual minimum: ~$38,400, on top of base M365 licenses.
  • Grengin path: Deploy a 4-vCPU Marketplace VM. Grengin VM cost: 4 × $0.001 × 24 × 30 = $2.88/month. Underlying AWS/Azure compute for the instance: ~$60–$120/month depending on instance type. No per-user fee. Annual platform total: ~$750 – $1,500. (Plus LLM usage paid to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google at provider cost—the same as you'd pay anywhere.)

The Copilot path may still be the right answer if Office-grounded AI is your primary use case. The Grengin path wins decisively when AI usage spans tools, models, and use cases that Copilot wasn't built for.

Note: Microsoft published a Copilot Business promotional rate of $18/user/month (annual) through June 30, 2026, dropping to $21 thereafter. Plan budgets accordingly. The July 1, 2026 Microsoft 365 commercial pricing update also affects base-suite list prices.

Deployment Options

Where each product can physically run and how fast you go live.

Option Microsoft 365 Copilot Grengin
Microsoft-hosted SaaS Yes —
Customer's own cloud (single-tenant) — Yes
Self-hosted from source — Yes
Air-gapped / on-prem — Possible from source
Works with Google Workspace — Yes
Works with non-Microsoft IdP — (requires Entra ID) Yes (any SAML/OIDC)
Time to first user Tenant readiness + rollout ~5 minutes

Why Teams Choose Grengin Over Microsoft 365 Copilot

1

No Microsoft tax.

You don't need E3, E5, Business Standard, or Business Premium. You don't need OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange, or Teams. You don't need Entra ID. Grengin works with Google Workspace, mixed environments, and Microsoft tenants equally well.

2

Multi-model from day one.

Copilot is OpenAI-via-Azure-shaped. Grengin lets your team choose between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, Cerebras, and open-source models per task.

3

No per-seat pricing at all.

$0.001 per vCPU-hour for the Marketplace VM. Cloud compute at standard AWS/Azure rates. LLM usage at provider cost. No Copilot Studio surprise. No capacity packs.

4

Five-minute Marketplace deployment.

Click deploy in AWS or Azure Marketplace, SSO connect, invite your team. No tenant-readiness assessment, no Purview blueprint, no SharePoint cleanup project.

5

Runs entirely in your cloud account.

AWS or Azure, your KMS keys, your region, your security perimeter—without Microsoft as a hosting prerequisite.

6

Cost analytics finance actually uses.

Per-user, per-department, per-project AI spending in real time, with hard caps.

7

Open-source software.

Audit the code, fork it, run it on your own metal if you outgrow the Marketplace model.

8

Compliance lives where it should.

Because Grengin runs in your environment under your existing controls, your auditor evaluates your SOC 2 / ISO posture for the deployment, not a vendor's separate certification.

Migration Guide: From Microsoft 365 Copilot to Grengin

Migrations from Copilot tend to fall into two patterns: augmentation (keep Copilot for Office-embedded AI, add Grengin for cross-stack AI), and replacement (move all AI workloads to Grengin). The guidance below covers both.

0

Week 0: Pre-flight checklist

  • Decide augmentation vs. replacement. Augmentation is the common path for E5-heavy organizations; replacement is common for SMBs whose Copilot rollout is still in pilot or hasn't fully landed.
  • Inventory current Copilot usage by user and by app. The Microsoft 365 admin center surfaces adoption metrics.
  • Inventory non-Microsoft AI usage (Slack AI, NotebookLM, Notion AI, personal ChatGPT/Claude). Grengin's value increases sharply when you consolidate these.
  • Map your top 10 Copilot use cases (for example "summarize this Teams meeting," "draft this Outlook reply," "build this Excel formula") to Grengin equivalents.
1

Week 1: Stand up Grengin

  • Day 1. Deploy the Grengin VM from AWS or Azure Marketplace—the five-minute path. Connect your IdP. Azure AD/Entra ID is fully supported via standard SAML 2.0/OIDC, so you keep your Entra-managed identities and bring them into Grengin.
  • Day 2. Provision via SCIM 2.0 or bulk CSV.
  • Day 3. Configure model access. Most teams enable GPT (so users moving from Copilot find a familiar model), Claude (for long-context work), Gemini Flash (for cheap summarization), and Groq Llama (for fast drafts).
  • Day 4. Configure governance: usage caps, PII detection sensitivity, audit-log retention, per-department system prompts.
2

Week 2: Pilot

  • Move 15–25 users (cross-functional) to Grengin while leaving their Copilot seats intact for a controlled overlap.
  • Daily standups for the first three days. Common questions: "How do I do Copilot's Excel formula thing?" (answer: paste the data; Grengin's code interpreter handles it). "How do I summarize a Teams meeting?" (answer: paste the transcript; Claude handles long-form summarization with high quality). "Where is my Word document AI?" (answer: paste or upload the document, or use Grengin's API to integrate into your existing Word flow).
  • Capture per-department workflows and codify them as Grengin system prompts.
3

Week 3: Full rollout

  • Invite all remaining users.
  • Run a 30-minute training session per department. Emphasize: model switching, where to view conversation history, how to use the usage gauge.
  • Update internal policy: which use cases stay on Copilot (augmentation) vs. move to Grengin (replacement).
4

Week 4: Reduce or sunset Copilot licensing

  • For augmentation: keep Copilot seats only for users with consistent in-Office Copilot usage. Most organizations find this is a subset (often 30–60%) of the original Copilot population.
  • For replacement: notify your Microsoft account team of non-renewal at the appropriate contract milestone. Note: under the 2026 packaging update, some Copilot Chat-style features remain available at no extra cost on eligible base M365 plans—you do not lose all AI access by sunsetting paid Copilot.
5

Data and prompt migration specifics

  • Copilot conversation history. Copilot logs are retained in Exchange under your existing Microsoft 365 retention policies. You can leave them there for compliance; Grengin starts a fresh conversation history.
  • Custom Copilot Studio agents. Translate agent prompts into Grengin role/department system prompts. Where agents called external APIs, plan to reimplement them against Grengin's API (or wait for Grengin's native agent feature, Phase 3 roadmap).
  • Sensitivity labels. Grengin does not directly read Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels. If you rely on label-based DLP, you'll handle equivalents via Grengin's PII-detection rules and per-department model restrictions.

Change management notes

The single most common question from Copilot users moving to Grengin is "Where is the AI button inside Word?" Answer it directly:

Grengin is a separate workspace, not an in-app button, and the trade-off is that the same workspace works inside Word, Slack, Notion, Linear, Google Docs, Figma comments, anywhere. Most users adjust within 48 hours.

FAQ

Questions by audience

Quick answers for IT, finance, and end users—expand a question to read the full response.

For IT and Engineering leaders

Does Grengin support Entra ID?

Yes—Azure AD/Entra ID is fully supported as a SAML 2.0 / OIDC IdP.

Can we keep Microsoft 365 and still use Grengin?

Of course. The two coexist cleanly. Many customers keep Copilot for in-Office AI and use Grengin for cross-stack AI and governance.

Does Grengin read SharePoint / OneDrive content directly?

Not natively today. Users can upload files; native SharePoint/Drive connectors are on the roadmap.

Does Grengin meet EU data residency?

Yes—the Marketplace VM runs in your AWS or Azure region of choice, including EU regions.

HIPAA?

Because Grengin runs in your cloud account, your HIPAA posture for the deployment is your own. The relevant BAA is between you and whichever LLM provider processes the prompt data (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others offer BAAs for their enterprise tiers). Grengin Inc. is not in the data path.

For procurement and finance

Will we save money by switching off Copilot?

Usually yes, especially if Copilot adoption is uneven. The arithmetic varies; we model it for you in a 15-minute call.

Is there a way to bring our own LLM API keys (BYOK)?

Yes. Open-source self-hosted deployments use your keys directly; Marketplace deployments can use BYOK or pass-through at provider cost.

How is Grengin billed?

Grengin Marketplace VM: $0.001 per vCPU-hour, metered through AWS or Azure Marketplace and added to your cloud bill. Cloud compute: at AWS/Azure standard rates. LLM usage: at provider cost. Support contracts: optional, purchased separately on grengin.com.

For end users

Will Grengin read my emails to answer questions like Copilot does?

Not in the same automatic way. You can paste or upload content into the chat, and use Grengin's API to integrate into your email flow.

Is GPT available?

Yes—GPT-4o and GPT-5.x are first-class models. Plus Claude, Gemini, Groq, Cerebras, and open-source models.

Can I switch models mid-conversation?

Yes.

Ready to Compare for Yourself?

Five-minute deployment from AWS or Azure Marketplace. Try Grengin alongside your Copilot rollout for two weeks and run the cost-and-coverage report.

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