LearningFlow LearningFlow vs Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft Copilot answers from the web on every eligible seat, and a paid add-on lets it read your own mail, chats and files under the permissions already in place. It is built to help one person at their desk; LearningFlow is built to get work from one teacher to a class and back.
AI assistants · Sources last read 13 September 2026
Choose Microsoft Copilot if
Choose Microsoft Copilot when the work that matters already sits in Outlook, Teams and SharePoint.
- A head of department asks what was agreed last term, and the answer is buried in Teams chats and Outlook threads.
- Every prompt and reply must be searchable in Purview eDiscovery and held under the school's retention policy.
- Staff want drafting help inside Word and Outlook this week, and A3 seats already include Copilot Chat at no extra cost.
Choose LearningFlow if
Choose LearningFlow when what you make has to reach students under their own accounts and come back.
- A Year 7 teacher builds a quiz and hands it out by join code, and the class opens it in their own student accounts.
- Under-13s are in the room, and Copilot is not available to them at any price.
- A trust wants one credit pool across twelve schools instead of a seat count to forecast.
Where the two are built differently.
A role, not a set of switches.
Everyone inside gets the product. If a feature is not right for a group — thirteen-year-olds, or a department mid-pilot — the answer is to not give them an account at all.
Seven switches, per group.
Year 7 opens the library and can chat. They cannot build apps or reach the database. Change your mind at 9am and it is different at 9.01, for that group only — without removing anyone's account.
What each one does.
Written from each product's own documentation. Where something is true only on a higher tier, the row says so.
| Microsoft Copilot | LearningFlow | |
|---|---|---|
| Your own mail and files | On the paid add-on it answers from Microsoft Graph, reading mail, chats, meetings and SharePoint files, trimmed to what each person may already see. | It reads the files you give a flow or the sandbox, and it does not index your mail or SharePoint. |
| Running without a subscription | Every user needs a qualifying Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licence, and reading your own mail, chats and files needs a paid add-on on top of that licence. | No subscription is required. You buy credits rather than seats, and personal, organisation and enterprise wallets stay separate. |
| When a member leaves | OneDrive delegates access to the manager automatically, but Copilot Pages, Notebooks and Loop My workspace need an owner added by hand before the retention period ends. | The organisation id is stamped when the object is made and never moves, so removing a member deletes the membership row, not the work. |
| Calling it from your software | Copilot Chat has no API; a licensed tenant gets the Retrieval API and a Chat API still in preview. | Every flow has an address: POST /task/:taskId with an x-api-key, optional SSE streaming, per-key credit top-up and usage reporting. |
| Choice of model | The Cowork picker lists Auto, GPT 5.5 Frontier, GPT 5.6 Sol and Terra, GPT 6 Astra, Opus 5, Claude Sonnet 5 and Claude Fable 5.1, plus an effort level. | Flow Designer reaches Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek among others, and no plan or seat tier narrows the list. |
| Apps you can publish | Copilot Studio publishes agents to Teams, SharePoint, a public website or your own app, and agents that reach tenant data are metered on top of the licence. | Describe an app and get a working one with its own address and sign-in, with client, webhook and scheduler apps sharing one database. |
| Selling it on to others | Partners resell Copilot to other organisations through the Cloud Solution Provider programme, but the unit stays a per-user licence in each tenant, not a pooled balance you price yourself. | Sub-organisations sit under an enterprise with wholesale credit pools, per-currency rates, volume tiers, Stripe and senangPay. |
| Record of what was asked | Prompts and responses are stored in the tenant, found through Content Search and Purview eDiscovery, and governed by retention policies. | Learner activity goes out as xAPI, to a self-hosted SQL LRS or the organisation's own, with nothing comparable for chat discovery. |
It reaches the person who made it.
The making and the giving-out are different products. Whether thirty students actually opened it is a question answered somewhere else, or not at all.
It reaches the class, and comes back.
Students are a user type, not an afterthought — they sign in, they get the same tools their teacher chose to allow, and what they do is visible to the teacher without a second product in between.
What comes with it here.
A real Linux sandbox
Work with AI runs Python, pandas and LibreOffice with the network switched off, then hands back an .xlsx whose formulas still calculate.
59 tools already built
Lesson plans, rubrics, quizzes, worksheets, report comments and questions on a YouTube video, in a gallery you can run today.
A narrated whiteboard video
One sentence becomes an MP4 in 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1, with subtitles burned into the picture or handed over as a separate .srt subtitle file.
Access you can take back
A grant names the tables, the columns and a row filter, carries an expiry, and is revoked for one app without touching the others.
Where Microsoft Copilot is the better choice
If your school already runs on Microsoft 365 and the answer you need sits in last term's Teams chats, Outlook threads and SharePoint files, Copilot reads those chats, threads and files under the permissions already in place, and LearningFlow does not. It is also the better assistant for open-ended thinking: reading a forty-page inspection report, drafting a response, then arguing back when you push on it. Many teachers should keep a general chat assistant like Copilot, whatever they use to build lessons with. And a trust that needs every prompt and reply held under retention and findable in Purview eDiscovery has no equivalent here.
The whole stack against Microsoft Copilot.
The table above compares the two at the job they share. This one runs every capability past both, because what a school is choosing between is usually a tool that does one job and a workspace that does many. Hover any mark to see what it means, and a partial one to see exactly what is limited.
| LearningFlow | Microsoft Copilot | |
|---|---|---|
| Ask and read | ||
| Chat with AI | ||
| Research the web and write it up | ||
| Read text off an image or a scan | ||
| Agent browses the live web | ||
| Make | ||
| PowerPoint deck | ||
| Spreadsheet with working formulas | ||
| Word document | ||
| Image generation | ||
| Video generation | ||
| Narrated whiteboard video, corrected scene by scene | ||
| Voice-over | ||
| Song generation | ||
| Interactive web page | ||
| Edit what it made, online | ||
| Slide and design templates | ||
| Presenter on camera, from a photo you supply | ||
| Teach | ||
| Ready-made teacher tools | ||
| Build your own tool, no code | ||
| Lesson that branches on the answer | ||
| Hears them read aloud, checks pronunciation | ||
| Assign to a class with a join code | ||
| Assignments and submissions | ||
| Student accounts | ||
| LTI link from your LMS | ||
| Learning records to your own LRS | ||
| SCORM 1.2 package out | ||
| Build | ||
| Working app | ||
| Full working platform templates | ||
| Several apps over one database, rights each | ||
| App sends email or WhatsApp | ||
| App runs on a schedule | ||
| App accepts webhooks | ||
| Generate real-time apps | ||
| Generate AI-driven apps | ||
| Shared database | ||
| Revoke one app's access, not the others | ||
| Run | ||
| Run any tool from your own software | ||
| Choose the AI model, on every plan | ||
| Switch a feature off per group | ||
| Organisation keeps the work when staff leave | ||
| We do not do this | ||
| Transcribe a video or audio file | ||
| Custom domain for a published app | ||
Before they decide.
What do we pay before Copilot can read our own documents?
Two costs stack. Every user needs a qualifying Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licence, then the add-on: $30.00 per user per month paid yearly for Microsoft Copilot, or $18.00 per user per month on annual commitment for Microsoft Copilot Business. That $18.00 is promotional and first-year only through 31 December 2026, against a list price of $21.00, or $25.20 billed monthly. Copilot Chat is $0 on eligible plans, including education A1, A3 and A5, but an unlicensed user cannot reach Graph data with it.
Can we run both, and is there anything to migrate?
Yes, and most schools should. Teachers keep Copilot for drafting in Word and asking about their own mail and meetings, while LearningFlow builds the tools, apps and videos and hands them to students. There is nothing to migrate, because LearningFlow does not live in your tenant and holds no copy of it. Files that come out of the sandbox are ordinary .docx, .xlsx and .pptx, so they open in Office and save to OneDrive like anything else.
Can an admin allow image generation for staff but not for Year 9?
In Copilot, not cleanly as documented today. Licence assignment, app availability, Teams access, the web search policy, agent installation and Cowork spending policies can all be scoped to named users or Entra security groups. Image generation and Vision, covering screen and camera sharing, are documented as tenant-wide. Model availability works the same way. An admin can turn off the Anthropic model family, but Microsoft documents that setting as tenant-wide, so it cannot be given to one group of staff only.
Do students get their own accounts, and from what age?
Microsoft 365 Education gives students real accounts, with A1, A3 and A5 licensing, School Data Sync rosters and Teams Assignments for grading. Copilot on top of that is age-gated. Under-13s are not eligible at all, and a K-12 tenant must set an age group of NotAdult or Adult on every student account before any student gets access. In LearningFlow students are a user type of their own, with accounts, join codes and assignments.
Can our own software call either product?
Copilot Chat has no API; Microsoft's FAQ says so plainly. A licensed tenant gets the Retrieval API, which returns passages from your organisation's files that the person asking is already allowed to see, and a Chat API that is still in preview, both narrower than the product interface. In LearningFlow every flow has an address you can call with POST /task/:taskId and an x-api-key, with optional SSE streaming, per-key credit top-up and usage reporting. Published apps also accept signed webhooks and cron schedules.
Where this came from. Read on 13 September 2026. Microsoft Copilot changes its product and its prices without telling us, so check anything that decides a purchase.
Try it on your own work.
Teachers get credits every month, free. No card, no seat count.