Copilot Cowork runs in a tenant; the open-source repo is yours

Is Copilot Cowork the right cowork for your team?

A Microsoft 365 shop with no engineering team, work that must stay in the tenant, and an auditor who already knows the controls should take Copilot Cowork. Microsoft administers it, the seat and the credits are line items on one invoice, and nobody carries a pager for a server. A team that wants the coworker's instructions, skills and memory as files it can read in a diff should run Kortix instead. Mixed answers are common: Copilot Cowork for the inbox, Kortix for the work that has to outlive the subscription.

What Copilot Cowork runs, and where

Copilot Cowork is a feature of Microsoft 365 Copilot. An administrator enables it, and people reach it from the Copilot app on web, desktop or mobile. You describe an outcome, and it plans the steps. Mail goes out from Outlook and meetings land on the calendar. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files come back, it posts in Teams, and it works through files in OneDrive and SharePoint (Microsoft's Copilot Cowork overview, as of October 2026). Before it sends a message or books a meeting, it stops and asks.

The work runs on Microsoft's cloud rather than the laptop in front of you. Microsoft's launch post says files are not stored locally and tasks continue with the laptop shut. The product page says data stays in your tenant under the permissions people already have. That tells a Microsoft 365 buyer where the data sits and whose permissions apply, which is most of a security review. It does not tell them who holds the system that runs the work.

Billing is the other half of the design. Cowork needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot seat before it does anything, and each task is then metered in Copilot Credits. Microsoft prices a task from four inputs: model use, context retrieval, tool calls and runtime. Pay-as-you-go is listed at $0.01 per credit, with spend caps at the tenant, group and user level. The feature arrives switched off until an admin turns it on (Microsoft's general-availability post, as of October 2026).

Two products answer to the name Cowork

The name confuses buyers because both products now ship inside something larger. Microsoft Copilot Cowork went generally available on 16 June 2026 for work and school accounts, and Microsoft lists personal accounts as a preview. Since 16 September 2026, Claude Cowork has been a capability inside Claude rather than an app of its own. Anthropic merged Cowork and chat, so the work starts from any conversation, with Pro, Max and Ultra plans first (Anthropic's announcement, as of October 2026). Claude Cowork runs on web, desktop and mobile, and it comes with paid Claude plans. The Claude Cowork vs Microsoft Copilot page takes the pair apart on the rest, and what Claude Cowork is covers the merge itself. The Cowork page holds the ownership comparison that applies to both products.

What Copilot Cowork is good at, and what adoption costs

The output is the easy part to judge. Microsoft's own examples make a fair test set. A brief pulls account history, mail and open opportunities before a customer meeting. Inbox sorting arrives with drafted replies. A launch plan spans teams, and a budget analysis comes back with executive summaries written for leadership (Microsoft's Copilot Cowork page, as of October 2026). Cowork keeps working while the laptop is closed, which is the difference between an assistant you watch and a job you hand over.

Three constraints decide adoption. Where the work runs: Cowork works inside the tenant, on files in OneDrive and SharePoint, so when policy says the work may not leave that boundary the decision is already made. Who can approve: the person running a task approves each sensitive action, and an administrator controls access, the budget and the model list. Name that administrator before a pilot starts, because the same person can switch the whole thing off. What leaving costs: what a team teaches Cowork is a SKILL.md file in each person's OneDrive, under Documents/Cowork/skills/, and Cowork loads those files at the start of a session. A person can hold up to 50 of them, and share one with named colleagues from the Customize page (Use Copilot Cowork, as of October 2026). There is no repository to clone.

What a team owns instead

Kortix answers the tenant question with a repository. A project is a git repo with kortix.yaml at its root, and the agent files, skills, memory and connector settings are files in it. Session work reaches main through a change request. Merge is default-deny for agents. The repo is also the exit plan: a teammate reads the changed file, reads the diff, and reverts it.

Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free. Any model provider with your own keys. Open source. Read it, fork it, audit it.

A team that wants the setup portable can start with the self-hosting guide, and the migration page covers moving an existing setup across. If the open-source question is the one on the table, whether Copilot Cowork is open source answers it in one word.