One method, three runtimes.

Choose it when

You are on Microsoft 365 E3 or E5, you have an IT function, and the agent needs to sit where the work already happens — SharePoint, Teams, Outlook. Also when governance, DLP and tenant-boundary data handling are formal requirements rather than preferences.

What gets built

• Copilot Studio agents published to Teams and M365 Copilot
• Power Automate flows with proper error handling and retry
• AI Builder and Azure OpenAI prompts
• Azure Document Intelligence for OCR past AI Builder’s size limits
• Dataverse solutions packaged with environment variables, so dev to production is a configuration change rather than a rebuild

What it costs you

Copilot Studio, prepaid

$200/month for 25,000 credits

Copilot Studio, pay as you go

$0.01 per credit via Azure

M365 Copilot licence

$30/user/month enterprise

Credits per action run 1 for a scripted answer, 2 generative, 5 an agent action, 10 tenant-graph grounding, and 100 per ten premium-model responses. That hundredfold spread is why Copilot Studio estimates are unreliable until the agent design is fixed. The part most buyers miss: internal agent interactions by users who already hold a Copilot licence consume no credits at all.

Do not choose it when

You are on Google Workspace. The work is high-volume background processing where credits compound. You need to choose your own model.

Choose it when

The work needs judgement rather than plumbing — reading long documents, comparing and evaluating, drafting, extracting structure where the rules are decisions rather than fixed fields. Also when you want your own team using these tools properly.

What gets built

• Agents on the Agent SDK, running where you choose
• MCP servers exposing your systems to the model under controlled permissions
• Your own procedures packaged as reusable skills
• Evaluation harnesses, so output quality is measured rather than asserted
• Claude Code adoption for your developers

What it costs you

API

Token-based, no per-seat floor

Scaling

With document volume and output length

Quoting

After a measured sample, never before

Cost here is predictable once a real sample has been run, and unpredictable before that. We measure first and quote second, which is slower to a number and faster to a correct one.

Do not choose it when

Your compliance position rules out processing outside your own infrastructure and no data processing agreement will satisfy it. Or the task is pure plumbing with no judgement in it, where n8n is cheaper and simpler.

Choose it when

You are not on Microsoft, the budget is tight, volume is high enough that per-task billing dominates the cost, or the data genuinely cannot leave your servers.

What gets built

• Workflows and agent nodes, deployed into your own n8n instance
• Hosting on your infrastructure or an EU VPS you control
• Zapier only where an integration exists nowhere else, or where a first result in days matters more than unit cost

What it costs you

n8n Cloud Starter

€20/month annual, 2,500 executions

n8n Cloud Pro

€50/month annual, 10,000 executions

Self-hosted

Free software, €5–20/month server, unlimited executions

Zapier Professional

$19.99/month annual, 750 tasks

n8n bills one execution per workflow run regardless of how many steps it contains. Zapier bills per step, with overage at 1.25× and workflows paused at 3× the plan limit. On a ten-step workflow at volume that difference is an order of magnitude. Note that SSO, role-based access, git-backed environments and external secret stores are n8n Enterprise features — if your security team will ask for them, that belongs in the budget from the start.

Do not choose it when

You need an agent inside Teams or M365 Copilot for people who will not open another tool. Nobody on your side can own a server.