Copilot Studio vs. Stack AI

With so many AI products to choose from, all promising time savings and higher productivity, it’s easy to get lost in the marketing hype and overlook the actual user experience and feature set. As you choose the right software for you, it can be hard to understand which platforms will fit your work like a glove—and which will turn out to be too pricy and difficult to implement.

Microsoft Copilot Studio is the tech giant’s answer to increasing productivity using an end-to-end conversational AI experience, with most use cases revolving around the chatbot.

We’ll be comparing it to Stack AI, an enterprise-grade generative AI workflow automation tool. StackAI is leading the way in AI no-code development. With backing from Google and Y Combinator, and launched shortly after ChatGPT, we’ve empowered a community of 70,000+ builders to push the limits of Generative AI.

How does Copilot Studio compare to Stack AI?

Microsoft Copilot Studio vs Stack AI - A comparison

Microsoft Copilot Studio and Stack AI have similar objectives. Both:

• Empower your teams to build AI-powered solutions to a variety of use cases, with features to quickly share them and improve them over time.
• Have access to OpenAI’s latest models to use as the reasoning and generative engine.
• Are no code/low code platforms—you can build entirely without code or customize functionality with code.
• Have a wide range of integrations to help you connect all your data sources to the platform.

That’s it as far as similarities go. Let’s explore the key differences.

1. Platform Approach

1.1. Copilot Studio: a focus on conversational experience

Microsoft Copilot Studio’s Home Page, offering entry points to create a new agent, manage existing ones and start from templates.

Microsoft Copilot Studio focuses on two key use cases:

• Creating chatbots grounded on previously-uploaded knowledge, with the capacity of triggering actions in other systems if it detects the appropriate intent when chatting.
• Extending the baseline Microsoft Copilot assistant, letting you train your own chatbot to assist you in other Microsoft 365 apps. For example, if you want your Copilot for Word to be a specialist in your industry, Copilot Studio is where you’ll set that up.

While this chat-centric experience can solve many productivity and information problems, it’s not the best match for every daily workflow.

Microsoft Copilot Studio begins and ends in the conversational experience.

1.2. Stack AI: a platform to build AI agents beyond chatbots

Stack AI is more flexible here: even though you can build a chatbot with similar features to Microsoft Copilot Studio, it offers a lot more.

As far as interactivity goes, Stack AI offers the Chat Assistant, website chatbot, Slack, SMS and WhatsApp integrations for all your conversational needs. Any time you chat with your bot, the project you configured will run to answer questions based on your data, interact with internal systems and make routing decisions if necessary.

But, beyond chatting, Stack AI also offers:

• A Form interface to run linear AI processes that you can download as a PDF
• Batch that runs processing on lists of items
• API for programmatic access and integration with your other internal tools
• Chrome Extension, so you can browse and use your projects at the same time
• Voice assistant to interact with your project using voice commands

2. User experience

2.1. Copilot Studio: A menu and a linear step-by-step interface

Microsoft Copilot Studio’s building experience uses a linear step-by-step interface to configure interactions between the user and the bot.

Each new agent in Copilot studio starts the same way. You can type in a prompt to customize the flow, which is a good time-saver when compared with starting from scratch. The range of actions you can run is varied, letting you pull information and control other systems from the chat window. But all of these have a linear nature within the question/response loop between the bot and the user.

Microsoft’s software user experience design philosophy has deep roots, stretching back to the earliest days of Windows GUIs. Over time, its products are growing with heavy menus with multiple sub-items—and, the deeper you go, more obscure terminology can pop up. While this is a testament to a robust feature set, it’s also limiting in an age where modern software is more visual, activating other modes of human thought and creativity.

2.2. Stack AI: A user-friendly drag-and-drop interface

Stack AI’s Workflow screen, where you can drag, drop and connect nodes representing inputs, outputs and LLMs.

Stack AI was developed from the ground up around the canvas experience, similar to a Miro for generative AI automation. Every input, output and LLM is a node that you can drag, drop and connect in any way. Some of these nodes generate data that you can use in other nodes—for example, you can use an AI output in the system instructions of another AI model later in the flow.

When you click to run a test, you can see each node fire and work together to reach the end of the flow. This gives an intuitive view of how actions happen, how data is processed and how it comes together in the output window. This keeps the learning curve shallow and facilitates troubleshooting.

3. Integrations

3.1. Copilot Studio: leverages Microsoft ecosystem

Copilot Studio offers a limited number of integrations to data sources, mainly to SharePoint, Public websites, and Dataverse.

If you’re a Google Workspace user or run your infrastructure on other cloud providers such as AWS, you’ll have to use data connections to integrate your systems—while some are native to Copilot Studio, others are available via Microsoft Graph or Dataverse, separate products intended for developers and IT teams.

3.2. Stack AI: works across software ecosystems

A view of Stack AI’s data connections modal, the starting point for integrating external data sources.

On the contrary, Stack AI is built for integrating with other apps, giving no preference to any ecosystem or suite. It offers robust connectors to popular apps in the Microsoft, Google and Amazon offering, as well as SaaS giants like HubSpot, Salesforce, Notion and Zapier, among many others. For niche apps and custom systems, API connectors are also available. The integration process is simple, as you only have to find the credentials, keys or account details for each third-party platform and set them up in the Stack AI Connections screen.

4. AI models

4.1. Copilot Studio: OpenAI

Microsoft uses natural language processing in tandem with OpenAI’s models to power the chatbot experience. While OpenAI remains at the top of the race at the time of writing, it’s not a guarantee that their models are the best for every use case. You can’t freely choose which models to use in Copilot Studio.

In Copilot's general tab for each agent, the model is preset and cannot be changed by the user.

4.2. Stack AI: Anthropic and Google models, among many more

Stack AI integrates with all the leading LLMs on the market, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and many others.

Stack AI provides all OpenAI models, including GPT-4o and o1, as well as Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini. But that’s not all: you can use Meta’s Llama, Mistral’s efficient model family and even XAI’s Grok, among others. You can balance reasoning, conversational memory, inference speed or customization based on workflow needs.

Read this blog post to find the best AI model for your specific use case.

5. Offering

5.1. Copilot Studio: part of Microsoft 365 offering

Microsoft pricing structure can be difficult to navigate, with so many products, subscription tiers and packages.

Additionally, licenses and accounts need to be managed in the highly-technical 365 Admin Center.

If you have an IT team that’s familiar with Microsoft’s software management style, this shouldn’t be a problem—only an additional task on the backlog.

However, if you want to accelerate your GenAI journey and seamlessly integrate AI across departments, the process can quickly become complex—especially when each team has to navigate account setup and requirements on their own.

On top of this friction, Copilot Studio advanced features rely on other Microsoft products such as:

• Graph, for a unified API connector, streamlining external data sync.
• Dataverse, for long-term data storage and management.
• Power Automate, for creating comprehensive automations across apps using the chatbot.

This means that, even when you buy Copilot Studio, there are extra costs on the horizon if you’d like to take full advantage of everything it can do.

Finally, you will most probably need an integration of the likes of Accenture, PWC, or smaller consulting boutiques to build and deploy the assistants.

5.2. Stack AI: full-featured standalone solution

For Enterprise customers, Stack AI offers an easy-to-understand plan which includes:

• Custom number of runs
• Custom number of users
• Security tier: Stack AI offers different levels of security and compliance, all the way up to Virtual Private Cloud or on-premises deployment.
• Dedicated support

You'll pay a flexible monthly fee that scales with your usage, ensuring predictable costs as your needs grow. All features are included, with no hidden fees.

6. Customer Support

6.1. Copilot Studio: a less tailored approach

While Microsoft is moving in the AI space, it has a wider customer base to cater to, which means:

• The iteration cycles for new features can be longer due to long approval processes.
• Microsoft is building for a wide audience, which means that some features may be watered down and lack advanced features.
• Each new feature includes a lot of controls and deep documentation to apply to as many use cases as possible, increasing adoption time and learning curve.
• Only the highest paying clients may have a bearing on overall development direction—and these are usually multi-million dollar companies with huge software contracts.

6.2. Stack AI: more than support

Stack AI has a dedicated support team that you can reach out to. You can take advantage of office hours with solution engineers, workshops, onboarding sessions and quarterly business reviews to measure your GenAI journey's value created.

Stack AI is built with a user-first approach, allowing you to suggest new features, which are carefully considered in our development planning process. You can ask questions and receive support as you develop your AI roadmap.

The platform is evolving quickly with new features and AI models every month. This high access to the team means that the platform evolves with your business needs.

Microsoft Copilot Studio and Stack AI: which is better?

Microsoft Copilot Studio focuses on the chat experience, adding AI elements that increase its flexibility and interactivity with other systems. It does this using the trademark Microsoft software development philosophy which, while popular and robust, is based on more traditional principles. It only works with OpenAI models to offer intelligent conversational experiences in the Microsoft 365 suite and in other apps via native integrations and others via Microsoft Graph.

Stack AI is a more flexible tool, providing a variety of user experiences to interact with AI. You can build your projects using a visual drag, drop and connect experience, intuitively configuring all the settings in each node. It accepts a wide range of integrations for data input, connects to all leading LLMs and has an account sign up flow so you can get started as soon as possible.

Create a free account and start automating your work today with Stack AI today.