Comparison
Copilot vs Balt: a platform or a colleague
Copilot is already in your licences and does not know your trade. Copilot Studio gives you the means to build an agent; Balt arrives with the recruitment work already done.
€100 in credits when you sign up
Last updated: August 2026
- Copilot is a platform rather than a finished agent: Copilot Studio builds agents and Agent 365 governs them, but neither supplies the knowledge of a trade.
- Being already installed is not the same as knowing the trade. Copilot sits in every Microsoft 365 tenant and inherits your identities; what it does not carry is what a client accepts, what an availability is worth, or what a rejection forbids for six months.
- A platform’s real cost is not the licence but the person who writes the business rules, maintains them and documents them, and that person works at your company.
- Balt arrives with the recruitment layer already written and already corrected by other firms, writes into the ATS with no migration, and holds an approval line before anything reaches a candidate.
The trade layer
Already written
Balt · and corrected by other firms before you
Microsoft Copilot Yours to write and to maintain
First useful result
In days
Balt · no integration project
Microsoft Copilot Counted in quarters
Who maintains it
Us, under contract
Balt · when a client changes its format
Microsoft Copilot Somebody at your company, who has another job
Choose Balt if…
You place consultants and recruitment is your revenue. You have no internal team free to build and maintain an agent, and you want a result in days rather than quarters.
What Balt does not cover
Balt does not replace your office suite and does not try to. Copilot stays where it is for documents, search and internal requests; Balt covers the recruitment work those tools never touch.
What each one does
Microsoft Copilot
Microsoft Copilot is a platform rather than a finished agent. Copilot Studio builds agents, including autonomous ones capable of long-running operations, and Agent 365 governs them: inventory, permissions, behaviour, activity and cost in one place. It ships with the surface, the orchestration, the governance and the hosting, and it already knows your identities.
Balt
Balt is the layer Copilot deliberately does not ship: the trade. It knows that an announced availability is optimistic, that a dossier is presented differently per client, that a submission rejected on price creates a rule for months. That layer is written by hand, corrected by other firms before you, and it is the whole of what a vertical product sells.
Comparison
Balt and Microsoft Copilot, point by point
| Criterion | Microsoft Copilot | Balt |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A platform you build an agent on | An agent already trained on one trade |
| Already in place | Yes, in every Microsoft 365 tenant | No. An additional supplier to bring in |
| Identities and rights | Inherited from the tenant. Its strongest advantage | Acts with the requester’s rights, logged per person |
| Trade knowledge | You write it, and you maintain it | Shipped, and corrected by other firms before you |
| Governance | Agent 365, the best control plane on the market | Approval line on outbound, audit trail per action |
| What it costs to run | The $30 per user seat covers packaged agents. A custom agent draws Copilot Credits invoiced separately: packs of 25,000 at $200 a month, or about $0.01 per credit pay-as-you-go, with one message costing between one and two hundred credits. | One line, billed on consumption. A credit is worth the real cost of the work plus margin, there is no seat to buy and no capacity pack to top up. |
| Time to first useful result | Counted in quarters | Counted in days |
| Who maintains it | Somebody at your company, who has another job | Us, under contract |
Agent 365 governs agents. It does not supply one
Agent 365 brings the inventory of agents in service, their permissions, their behaviour, their activity and their cost together in one place, and the authoring interface surfaces each agent’s security posture. It is a serious control plane and it answers a real problem.
It answers a governance problem, though, not a recruitment one. A control plane tells you which agents run, with what rights and at what cost; it does not know that a client refuses profiles without clearance or that an announced availability is optimistic. Governing an agent well and having one that knows your trade are two different purchases, and the first does not produce the second.
What “building your agent” actually costs
A platform gives you the means, it does not do the work. Somebody has to decide what the agent does, write the rules, choose the connections, test, fix things when a client changes how they want a dossier, and document enough that the next person understands. That somebody works at your company and has another job.
Build cost is visible and gets accepted; maintenance cost appears in no quote, and it is what kills the project eighteen months later. It is one reason Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled before the end of 2027, and the cited causes are rarely technical.
The bad case is not building. It is building without having named who maintains.
What "included in our licences" actually covers
This is the part of the objection that is worth checking before anything else, because the answer is partly no. A Microsoft 365 Copilot seat runs at $30 per user per month and carries an allowance for the packaged agents Microsoft ships. A custom agent, and especially an autonomous one, is not that.
Custom agents draw on Copilot Credits, invoiced separately from the seat. Capacity is sold in packs of 25,000 credits at $200 per pack per month, or metered pay-as-you-go through an Azure subscription at roughly $0.01 per credit with no commitment. Copilot Studio is therefore priced on consumption rather than on seats, which is the same shape as ours.
The figure that matters is the spread. A single user message can draw anywhere from one credit to more than two hundred, depending on how the agent was built: how much context it carries, how many tools it calls, how many turns it takes. That variance is not a billing detail, it is a direct consequence of design decisions your team will be making for the first time.
None of this makes building wrong. It makes the sentence "it is already paid for" wrong, and that sentence is usually what ends the evaluation before it starts.
When the volume makes the difference
The trigger is repetition. One dossier a month is a task; forty a week is a process, and a process is where re-explaining the trade on every request stops being an annoyance and becomes the largest line in the bill.
That is why the answer depends on your headcount rather than on a feature grid. A firm hiring a handful of people a year has a drafting problem, and drafting is well served by tools it already owns. A firm placing consultants has a staffing problem, which is a different thing entirely and lives inside an ATS.
At that volume, writing into the ATS, approval before anything reaches a candidate and European hosting stop being arguments and become conditions. An agent that cannot do those three is not an incomplete tool for a staffing firm, it is an unusable one.
Frequently asked questions
Is Copilot enough to automate recruitment?
It gives you the technical means, not the knowledge of the trade. What is missing is not the ability to call an ATS, it is knowing what a client accepts and what an availability is worth. Somebody has to write those rules, and that somebody is at your company.
Can you run Copilot and Balt together?
Yes, and it is the common case. Copilot serves the whole company on office work, Balt serves one team on its own. The rule to hold is that their context domains must not overlap, otherwise two memories diverge in silence.
We are already paying for Copilot. Why pay again?
Because they answer different problems. Copilot covers documents, search and internal requests across the company; it does not write into your ATS, does not know your clients’ rules and does not hold an approval line before a message reaches a candidate. The overlap is smaller than the shared vocabulary suggests.
Give Balt its first job.
Twenty minutes is enough to watch Balt work on one of your real openings.