Gemini for Google Workspace and Copilot for Microsoft 365 both promise to enhance productivity, streamline workflows, and integrate seamlessly with their respective ecosystems. But do they deliver? Let’s compare their business and enterprise offerings.

What is Gemini for Google Workspace?

Gemini for Google Workspace is an AI-powered assistant that integrates with Google applications like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet. It helps users draft emails and documents, generate images for presentations, and enhance virtual meetings with features like AI-generated summaries and caption translations. Read our full review of Gemini.

What is Copilot for Microsoft 365?

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is an AI-powered assistant that integrates with Microsoft Office applications like Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It leverages OpenAI’s models to help users refine writing, convert documents into presentations, analyze data, and summarize long emails and documents. Read our full review of Copilot.

Pricing

Both Gemini for Google Workspace and Copilot for Microsoft 365 offer tiered subscription plans.

Copilot’s free plan looks alluring – and Gemini and Copilot seem pretty much the same in terms of their paid plans. But let’s break down what you actually get with each tier.

Verdict: It’s pretty even

No one really pulls ahead here. Copilot’s free plan is useless for businesses since it doesn’t integrate into the Microsoft Office suite. And beyond that, their pricing and plans are fairly on par. So let’s talk about how valuable their features are.

Feature sets

Gemini and Copilot promise a lot of the same productivity boosters.

✅ = it exists and we love it

☑️ = it exists but it’s lacking

❌ = it doesn’t exist

Copilot provides assistance across the Microsoft suite, whereas Gemini is a bit more fragmented. Their data organization tool was never released as a part of their paid plan, and the features available in Slides and Meet are either ineffectual or a bit gimmicky. Let’s dig into what they actually look like in practice.

Head-to-head comparison

They boast the same features across tools – but how helpful are they really?

Docs vs. Word

In Google Docs, Gemini can generate blog posts, project plans, and briefs. Its proofreading capabilities and editing features check for grammar, spelling, and style.

In Word, Copilot can generate first drafts, offer new ideas, and build upon existing content. It can also take these Word docs and turn them into fully fleshed out PowerPoints complete with speaker notes. For longer documents, Copilot can also create summaries and allows you to ask questions about the content.

‍The winner: Copilot

Slides vs. Powerpoint

Gemini’s assistance in Slides is limited to image generation, which isn’t that helpful if you’re looking to design a full deck.

In addition to generating an entire Powerpoint presentation and speaker notes from a Word doc, Copilot can help reorganize your slides into a more effective narrative, suggest new content and edits, and provide a summary of the presentation when prompted.

‍The winner: Copilot

Sheets vs. Excel

Gemini’s organization feature for Sheets allegedly helps you create templates for task trackers and agendas from a single prompt. It can also apparently detect incomplete data and predict the remaining values. However, this feature was not included with the business or enterprise Gemini plans and is currently invite-only so we haven’t been able to test it ourselves.

In Excel, Copilot can provide intelligent formula suggestions, simplifying complex calculations and spreadsheet setup. It can also analyze your data and summarize it to help you explore trends and better understand the information in your spreadsheets.

‍The winner: Copilot

Meet vs. Teams

Gemini’s Meet features are its most robust. It allows you to create custom backgrounds, and adopt “studio” lighting, sound, and filters. Its most useful feature, however, are the caption translations available in their enterprise plan.

In Teams, Copilot provides meeting summaries to those who join late so they can catch up on what they’ve missed. You can prompt Copilot at any time during the call to generate summaries, action items, and discussion questions. It will also prompt attendees to discuss next steps before the end of a call and recap them afterwards.

‍The winner: Teams in Copilot

Gmail vs. Outlook

In Gmail, Gemini can help you draft emails for outreach, responses, or help refine drafts to be more clear and concise.

In Outlook, Copilot can help draft and edit emails, facilitating quick outreach and responses. It can also create summaries for long email chains to help you get caught up.

‍The winner: It’s a tie

Chatbot vs. Chatbot

Gemini 1.5 is a definitively better writer than Copilot. The kind of writing it can produce feels more polished and human-like. That said, Gemini is limited by its lack of connectivity to documents in Google Drive.

Copilot, powered by GPT-4 Turbo, is able to reference existing data in OneDrive, which provides additional context for prompts. In combination with the fact that is ability to search the web seems miles ahead of Gemini – in that it’s more comprehensive and up to sate – makes it a more overall powerful chatbot.

‍The winner: Copilot

Verdict: Copilot takes it

When it comes to pricing, you’re looking at about the same investment. But the value you get from Copilot is heads above what you get from Gemini.

The seamlessness of Copilot’s features is hard to beat. The ability to turn Word docs into Powerpoints with speaker notes is a powerful time saver, and Copilot’s ability to search across all content – whether it be docs, emails, or spreadsheets – to provide answers and summaries is a win for efficiency.

Final Verdict: Copilot wins

Each of Copilot’s features drives efficiency, whereas many of Gemini’s features are fairly surface level and don’t integrate across their apps well. So it’s a pretty clean sweep for Copilot.

If your business runs on the Google Suite, don’t give up hope. There are likely to be feature updates soon. If you’re using Copilot already and you didn’t realize what was at your fingertips, join our new workshop on Applying Microsoft Copilot. We’ll turn you into a Copilot champion in 1.5 hours.

Want to see what else is out there? Explore our up-to-date LLM Guide.