SharePoint Premium vs Copilot for Microsoft 365: 5 Reasons SharePoint Premium May be Better for Your Organization

1. Copilot is narrowly scoped

Copilot is designed to do a lot of things well. SharePoint Premium has AI features though, and it’s designed to do one thing extremely well. That’s why SharePoint Premium is significant.

2. SharePoint Premium is better for end users who are deploying AI features

Copilot has many variants, but one thing is really clear: Prompt engineering is key. You’re going to need a strong prompt game to use it effectively and accurately.

That’s not very user-friendly. At least not to people who are new to AI. Prompt engineering is a tough skill to learn. You’ve got to change your thinking to be able to create prompts that make AI do what you really want it to do.

SharePoint Premium provides an easier learning curve. It acts as an extended set of SharePoint features, so it feels familiar to users. For instance, to use the Taxonomy Tagging feature for a column, you simply turn it on and point it at a term set. That’s it. The AI does the rest and auto-tags documents based on the document contents.

3. No-code AI models

Want to create custom models to process data and extract key details? With Copilot, you’ll need professional code and a developer’s skill set.

SharePoint Premium provides models you can customize. Say you want to start using SharePoint Premium’s document processing. If you need something custom, such as a custom document format that you need to extract information from, you can train that model inside SharePoint. You don’t have to even leave SharePoint! You can train that model on what your data looks like and what pieces to extract so that you can pull all that information out automatically.

SharePoint Premium does this by using an Azure AI in the background. You never have to deal with it. You don’t even have to know it’s back there. You simply get a user-friendly experience.

4. Out-of-the-Box SharePoint Integration

This is a big selling point for SharePoint Premium — as you would expect. It is SharePoint Premium, after all. Truly, it’s a way to level up the features that already come with SharePoint.

New and upgraded features in SharePoint Premium are integrated directly into SharePoint. You can enable them from the Microsoft 365 Admin Center for your site(s), just like any other SharePoint feature. Once you turn these additional features on, they look like they came straight out of the box with SharePoint. This gives users an easy onboarding experience, integrating seamlessly with the interface they already know.

Copilot wasn’t in SharePoint at the time of recording, but it will soon be. (Actually, there will be two of them! Check out my recent video on those here.)

However, these Copilots won’t help you in the ways you might expect. They won’t help with document processing, likely because SharePoint Premium is already positioned that way.

5. SharePoint Premium is cheaper to scale

Want Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365? No problem. You just pay the license fee of $30 per user per month here in the US, and that’s it. If you want more users to have those benefits, you’re going to have to buy more licenses. And that cost adds up fast.

(Note: There’s a per user license for SharePoint Premium, but those are designed for administrators who use the SharePoint Admin Center and deal with data governance and life cycle management, etc.)

Whether your users get a little bit of benefit — maybe they’re just using Copilot in Outlook, maybe they’re hardly ever using it — you’re still paying that license cost every single month. The benefit of the return on investment (ROI) isn’t there until those users are trained on governance processes and prompt engineering and leveraging the technology in their day-to-day. While it’s a part of adoption to train your users and familiarize them with the AI tools that they now have available in all the Office applications and inside Microsoft Teams, it will take time for them to get skilled up.

Compare that with SharePoint Premium. If you want to try out one feature, no problem. All you have to do is enable that one feature, and the pricing works around how many times you trigger that feature.  

Whether you need one user or a thousand users to benefit from that one feature, your associated cost doesn’t go up because it’s based on the number of triggers or activations of that feature. This is because most of the SharePoint Premium features—I would say most of the fun, high-impact features like Autofill Taxonomy Tagging—use a consumption-based billing system.

For example, I believe document translation costs are based on the number of words being translated. E-signature features are based on the number of e-signature requests. So if you are only using it a little bit, you only have a small cost. If you’re using it a lot that cost is going to go up relative to your usage.

A good example of this is Autofill Taxonomy Tagging in SharePoint Premium. Some users upload documents and leverage Autofill Taxonomy Tagging to add appropriate tags and metadata to their uploads.

However, many users don’t upload documents at all! They simply access a SharePoint library as a viewer, searching for and reading documents. With SharePoint Premium’s cost model, you won’t incur Azure costs for these users because only the use of the autofill feature triggers a fee.

The “viewer” users — and it could be thousands — won’t cost you a dime because they’re not using that autofill feature. They get to benefit for free!

Say you want a small test—no problem. Do you want a widespread rollout? That’s fine, too. One of the biggest selling points about SharePoint Premium is that the pricing scales with your needs, so you don’t have to pay a big, expensive upfront cost for licensing. It also means you’re not paying for that feature if you don’t use it in a given month.

This is a huge benefit during the adoption phase because you’re not always at that high cost like you are with Copilot for M365. It allows you to analyze your different business use cases and see where some of these features create value.

Even after the adoption phase, this cost model is beneficial because your cost isn’t scaling with your number of users. You’re only paying when you’re actually processing data.

That’s a really important point I want you to remember from this video: 

Just because you’re using AI doesn’t mean it has to be a very expensive process.

Conclusion

We understand the pressure to start leveraging AI in your business to stay ahead of the competition. However, it’s important to evaluate your options and find solutions that fit your business needs.

While both are excellent products, SharePoint Premium and Copiot are useful in different ways. Copilot has had tons of marketing, while SharePoint Premium has had very little. The success of SharePoint Premium may actually be due to Copilot. Think about it: Copilot is showing us all how much AI can do for Microsoft 365, which is making people ask, “How can I quickly deploy AI for my specific business problems?”

That’s the entire point of SharePoint Premium. It provides quick-to-deploy solutions right out of the box.

Looking for assistance with your SharePoint Environment?

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