Copilot Studio vs Agentforce: Pricing, Features and Which to Pick

The short answer

These two platforms rarely compete on features. They compete on where your data sits.

• Copilot Studio is Microsoft's low code builder on Power Platform. It is strongest for employee facing agents inside Teams, Outlook, SharePoint and Dynamics, governed by Entra, Purview and DLP policies.
• Agentforce is Salesforce's agent platform. It is strongest for customer facing service and sales agents that need to read and change CRM records, with the Einstein Trust Layer in front of every model call.

If you run both Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, the common answer is both: Copilot Studio for internal agents, Agentforce for customer facing ones. The scenarios below pick one winner each.

Pricing

Line item	Copilot Studio	Agentforce
Pay as you go	$0.01 per Copilot Credit	Flex Credits $500 per 100,000; $0.10 per action
Committed	$200 a month for 25,000 credits billed annually ($0.008 each); pre purchase 5% to 20% off	Pre purchase or pre commit Flex Credits
Per conversation	Not offered	$2 per conversation, customer facing only
Per user	Microsoft 365 Copilot $30 per user per month paid yearly zero rates internal use	Add ons $125 per user per month; user license $5 plus credits
Platform floor	None required; credits can be bought alone	Salesforce Core $195, Advanced $395 or Max $550 per user per month billed annually
Voice	10 to 75 credits per minute ($0.10 to $0.75)	$0.15 per voice action
Free to build	Maker trial, cannot publish	Salesforce Foundations $0

Worked comparison

A customer service agent handles 10,000 conversations a month. Each needs three generated answers and one action in a back end system.

• Copilot Studio: 3 x 2 credits + 1 x 5 credits = 11 credits, $0.11 per conversation. 110,000 credits a month is $1,100 on pay as you go, or $900 with four packs ($800) plus 10,000 metered credits ($100).
• Agentforce, Flex Credits: about 4 actions at $0.10 = $0.40 per conversation, $4,000 a month. On Conversations pricing it would be $2 each, $20,000.

Then add licenses. Copilot Studio needs none for customer facing agents. Agentforce assumes Salesforce seats for the people who build and supervise, from $195 per user per month billed annually on Core. For a 10 person service team on Core that is $1,950 a month you may already be paying.

The math flips for internal agents in a Microsoft 365 Copilot shop: licensed employees use agents with no credit charge, so the marginal cost is zero. See Copilot Studio pricing, Agentforce pricing and the AI Price Index.

Models and features

Feature	Copilot Studio	Agentforce
Models	GPT (default), Claude Sonnet and Opus, Azure AI Foundry models	Anthropic via Amazon Bedrock, Google Gemini, OpenAI
Builder	Low code canvas, Power Fx, agent flows	Agentforce Builder, Agent Script, Flows, Apex
Connectors	1,500+ prebuilt plus MCP and custom connectors	Native Salesforce clouds, MuleSoft APIs, MCP via AgentExchange
Channels	Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot, SharePoint, web, mobile, WhatsApp, Facebook, Slack and more via Azure Bot Service	Web chat, voice, Slack and Salesforce surfaces
Grounding	SharePoint, Dataverse, files, websites, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, Confluence	Data 360 (formerly Data Cloud) and CRM records
Voice	Phone agents billed per minute	Agentforce Voice billed per action
Governance	Entra identities, DLP data policies, Purview and Sentinel audit, per agent credit caps	Einstein Trust Layer, audit trail, Salesforce permissions
Self host	No; GCC, GCC High and DoD clouds	No; Salesforce cloud on Hyperforce

Copilot Studio wins on breadth: more connectors, more channels and model choice across GPT and Claude. Agentforce wins on depth inside one system: an agent that updates an opportunity, runs an existing Flow or calls Apex does it as a native citizen of Salesforce, not through an API.

Head to head scenarios

Internal IT and HR help desk in Teams

Winner: Copilot Studio. It publishes to Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, grounds answers on SharePoint with sensitivity labels, and licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot users pay no credits for classic answers, generative answers, agent actions or tenant graph grounding. Agentforce would need user licenses and credits for the same job.

Customer service agent on Salesforce Service Cloud

Winner: Agentforce. The agent can identify the customer, check the order, apply the return policy and create the case in Service Cloud without integration work, then hand off to a human in the same console. Copilot Studio can do this through connectors, but every step is an API call you have to build and secure.

Sales lead qualification and follow up

Winner: Agentforce. Leads, opportunities and activity history are Salesforce's core objects, and Agentforce for Sales is priced as a $125 per user add on or per action. Copilot Studio is the better pick only if your CRM is Dynamics 365 Sales.

A small team with a tight budget

Winner: Copilot Studio. There is no platform floor: a website FAQ agent with 2,000 conversations a month at 6 credits each costs about $120 on pay as you go. Agentforce's per action price is fair, but a five person Salesforce Core team pays $975 a month in licenses before any agent runs.

Phone support agent

Winner: Agentforce, if you are on Salesforce. A 3 minute call with 4 actions costs $0.60 on Agentforce Voice ($0.15 per action). On Copilot Studio generative voice at 35 credits a minute it costs $1.05 before any answers or actions. Off Salesforce, Copilot Studio is the only one of the two you can use.

Regulated or government workloads

Winner: Copilot Studio. Both list ISO 27001 family certifications, PCI DSS and HITRUST, and Salesforce adds ISO 42001 for AI management. Copilot Studio also runs in GCC, GCC High and DoD tenants and is covered by Microsoft's HIPAA BAA, which settles it for US public sector buyers. Note that government clouds default to GPT-4o.

Privacy

• Copilot Studio runs under Microsoft's Product Terms and Data Protection Addendum, supports customer managed keys and Customer Lockbox, and treats agents as Entra identities with Conditional Access through Agent 365. Microsoft warns that preview and cross geo models may process data outside your geography.
• Agentforce sends every prompt through the Einstein Trust Layer, which masks personal data before it leaves Salesforce and keeps third party model providers from storing or training on prompts and responses, with an audit trail of inputs and outputs.

Both are strong. Copilot Studio offers more admin controls over where data flows; Agentforce offers a cleaner guarantee at the model boundary.

Verdict

Copilot Studio is the better platform for most organizations because it serves the larger set of use cases, internal and external, without a license floor, and its per interaction prices are lower. Agentforce is the better platform for one important job: customer facing service and sales agents in companies whose customer data lives in Salesforce, where native access to records, Flows and Apex outweighs the higher per action price. If you have both systems, run both, and give each agent one clear system of record.

Read the full Copilot Studio review and Agentforce review, or see every option in best enterprise AI agent platforms.