ChatGPT Business vs Microsoft 365 Copilot vs Gemini vs Claude Team: Price per Seat and Data Terms (2026)

Four vendors sell an AI seat to a small US company, and each page names a different number. $20, $21, $18 and from $21 look close. They are not the same thing. One is a stand-alone chat product, one is an add-on to software you already pay for, and two are bundled into a larger suite.

We read each vendor's own pricing page and data-handling pages on 3 October 2026 and put the seat plans side by side. We haven't used any of these business plans ourselves, and none of these vendors pays us. For the API side of the same question, where the model runs and what it costs per token, see our EU data residency AI API cost guide and the private LLM cost guide.

What each seat costs per month

The entry seat costs $18 to $32 a month, depending on whether you count the Microsoft license. ChatGPT Business and Claude Team are identical at $20 annual and $25 monthly. Gemini Enterprise starts at $21. Microsoft's add-on is $21, or $18 until 31 December 2026.

Three details change what you pay.

• Premium seats. ChatGPT Business and Claude Team both sell a premium seat at $100 annual or $125 monthly. OpenAI says it has "5x more usage than standard, with no 5-hour limit". Anthropic says "5x more usage than standard seats". You can mix seat types in either product.
• Enterprise is quote-only on three of four. ChatGPT Enterprise is "Custom pricing". Gemini Enterprise Standard and Plus say "contact sales". Claude Enterprise lists a seat at $20 a month billed annually, plus usage at API rates, so the bill scales with how much your team uses it.
• The Microsoft promotion ends. The $18 Copilot Business price runs "between July 1, 2026, and December 31, 2026" and, in Microsoft's words, "promotional pricing applies to the first year only". After that it is $21.

Microsoft 365 Copilot: the add-on needs a license

Microsoft's $18 or $21 Copilot Business price is an add-on, not a full seat. Microsoft says "A separate license for a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan is required", and that the add-on is "available only to existing Microsoft 365 customers with an eligible Business plan".

So the honest comparison is the bundle. Microsoft sells two on the same page:

• Business Standard with Copilot: $23.50 a user a month paid yearly, $28.20 monthly.
• Business Premium with Copilot: $32 a user a month paid yearly, $38.40 monthly. Premium adds the advanced security tier.

If you already pay for Microsoft 365, the add-on at $18 to $21 is the number that matters. If you don't, the bundle at $23.50 is. We couldn't read the stand-alone Business Standard price from Microsoft's page, so we don't print it, and we don't subtract it from the bundle.

The enterprise version of Copilot is $30 a user a month paid yearly or $31.50 monthly, again with "a separate license for a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan". It adds search across 100+ connectors, Copilot Notebooks and analytics, per Microsoft's page.

What's included in each seat

All four give you chat, file uploads, connectors to your work apps, and shared projects or notebooks. The differences are in admin controls: SSO is on the entry plans, while SCIM, audit logs and role-based access are mostly reserved for Enterprise.

Each vendor's page says the following.

• ChatGPT Business lists "All ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex features", workspace agents, company knowledge, deep research and Excel, Word and PowerPoint extensions. It lists SOC 2 Type 2 as included and ISO 27001 as Enterprise only.
• Claude Team lists Claude Code, Claude Design, Slides and Docs, enterprise search and central billing. Opus, Sonnet and Haiku are all on Team. Anthropic's top model is limited to "50% of weekly limits" on premium seats. Neither lab states a numeric usage cap on the pricing page.
• Gemini Enterprise Business lists a no-code Workflow Builder, prebuilt agents, 25 GiB of pooled storage per seat and "Built-in security and governance". The Standard and Plus tier adds higher quota, VPC-SC and customer-managed encryption keys.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot puts AI inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, with pre-built agents such as Researcher and Analyst on the Business add-on.

Google Workspace is the fifth option. Its plans now include Gemini, with Starter showing limited access and Standard, Plus and Enterprise showing "expanded access" in Gmail, Docs, Meet and more. If your company already runs on Workspace, that is the baseline to compare against; we can't give you a dollar figure for it.

Data terms: what each vendor says

All four say they don't train their models on your business data by default. They differ on retention, the DPA and whether you can pick a region on the entry plan.

• OpenAI. "By default, we do not use your business data for training our models", unless you opt in. OpenAI can execute a Data Processing Addendum for ChatGPT Business, Enterprise and the API through a form. On Business, workspace admins control retention, and deleted conversations are removed within 30 days unless the law requires longer. Data residency in ten regions, including the US and EU, is listed for Enterprise and marked "No" for Business.
• Anthropic. "By default, we will not use your inputs or outputs from our commercial products… to train our models". The DPA with Standard Contractual Clauses is "automatically incorporated" into the Commercial Terms. Deleted chats leave back-end storage within 30 days, and chats flagged for policy violations can be kept for up to 2 years. Custom retention controls are Enterprise only, and the pricing page lists no data-region option for Team.
• Microsoft. "Prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph aren't used to train foundation LLMs". Copilot sits under Microsoft's Product Terms and Data Protection Addendum, and for EU customers it is an EU Data Boundary service. One catch in Microsoft's own docs: "Models provided by Anthropic as a subprocessor are currently excluded from the EU Data Boundary." Prompts and responses are logged and available to Purview and eDiscovery.
• Google. For Workspace, "Your content is not human reviewed or otherwise used for Generative AI model training outside your domain without permission", under the Cloud Data Processing Addendum. For Gemini Enterprise, prompts and outputs aren't used to train Google models or any other customer's. Data residency and customer-managed keys are on the Standard and Plus tier.

If you need an EU or UK region on the seat product, only the larger tiers list one: ChatGPT Enterprise, Microsoft 365 Copilot through its EU Data Boundary, and Gemini Enterprise Standard or Plus. Whether any of this meets your legal duties is a question for counsel. The API-side version of this table is in our EU data residency guide, and the security questions buyers ask about AI features are on our security hub.

What a year costs at 10, 25 and 50 users

At 25 users, a year of ChatGPT Business or Claude Team is $6,000 on annual billing and $7,500 month to month. Microsoft's Business Standard bundle is $7,050 and Gemini Enterprise Business starts at $6,300.

Monthly equivalents are the per-seat figure times the user count: 25 ChatGPT or Claude seats are $500 a month on annual billing, and 25 Microsoft Business Standard bundles are $587.50.

Read the table with three limits in mind.

• The add-on rows leave out the license. The $2,160 to $2,520 Copilot rows exclude the Microsoft 365 plan the add-on requires. Use the bundle rows if you don't have one.
• Premium seats multiply the bill. Ten ChatGPT or Claude premium seats on annual billing are $12,000 a year, five times a standard seat.
• Seat price isn't total cost. Heavy users can hit usage limits, and Anthropic and OpenAI both sell extra credits. We priced list seats, not what your team will actually use.

If the goal of the seats is to cut support or sales workload, price that outcome too. Our AI customer service cost guide covers the per-resolution math, and the AI automation hub collects the rest of the cost comparisons.

How to choose

aliteq sells none of these products and earns nothing from these links. Every price and data term here was read on the vendor's own page on 3 October 2026, and plans change often.