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Convira vs Microsoft 365 Copilot
Microsoft 365 Copilot information last checked: 26 October 2026
Both products are aimed at the same goal: getting real work done in documents rather than talking about it. Copilot works inside the Microsoft 365 apps and the content in your tenant. Convira is built for the work around that: files on a disk regardless of what created them, work that has to continue with no connection, and material that must not go to anyone's cloud.
What Microsoft 365 Copilot is
Microsoft 365 Copilot is AI built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, sold per user on top of a Microsoft 365 subscription. It draws on your organisation's own content through Microsoft Graph, so it can reason across the documents, mail and meetings your account can already reach. Agent mode, generally available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint since April 2026, makes multi-step changes inside the open file.
It is designed for organisations standardised on Microsoft 365: it sits in the apps people already have open and inherits the permissions the tenant already enforces.
What Convira does differently
The first difference is the boundary of the work. Copilot is strongest inside the Microsoft estate. Convira starts from the filesystem: a .docx someone emailed you, an .xlsx exported from a finance system, a stack of PDFs in a folder. It does not care which application produced the file or whether it is stored in a Microsoft service.
The second is where processing happens. Copilot runs in Microsoft's cloud under Microsoft's tenant commitments. Convira lets you decide per session: Local runs an Ollama-compatible model on your own machine and keeps working with no connection once models are downloaded, a Private Box runs a larger model on hardware you control on your own network, and Cloud reaches hosted frontier models.
The third is what the agent is allowed to do outside the document. Convira drives a visible browser and over a thousand connected services on Pro and higher plans, and the guard rails around that are enforced rather than described. Code and subprocess execution run under operating-system-level isolation - a Bubblewrap namespace jail on Linux, a deny-by-default Seatbelt profile on macOS, and an AppContainer with a Job Object constraining the process tree on Windows. Every other action passes through permission gates and network controls. Every connector action pauses for approval before it runs, reads included, and you can deny a connector outright per service. An automatic local backup is taken before Convira's file and document tools modify or remove a file, and restoring recovers a copy rather than overwriting anything.
Side by side
| Convira | Microsoft 365 Copilot | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it lives | A desktop app on macOS, Windows and Linux | Inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams |
| Which files it works on | Any file on your disk, whatever produced it | Your Microsoft 365 content, through Microsoft Graph |
| Where processing happens | Your machine, a Private Box on your LAN, or hosted models | Microsoft's cloud, under tenant commitments |
| Works with no internet | Yes, on the Local runtime | No |
| PDF work | Merge, fill forms, redact | Focused on Office formats |
| Browser automation | Yes, a browser you can watch | Researcher with Computer Use, in a virtual browser (Frontier program) |
| OS-level sandboxing of agent actions | Bubblewrap namespaces, Seatbelt, AppContainer | Tenant and Graph permissions instead |
| Automatic backup before a file changes | Yes | Version history |
| Working together | Team Hub: end-to-end encrypted DMs, groups and bulletin boards | Teams and SharePoint, readable by the tenant |
| Price | From $9/month standalone | Per user, on top of Microsoft 365 |
When Convira is the right choice
- The material must not leave your machine, and you want that enforced by where the model runs rather than by a policy commitment.
- The files are just files: exported, emailed, scanned, or produced by something that is not Microsoft.
- You need it to keep working with no network connection, on a flight or through an outage.
- You want an agent that can also drive a browser and connect to services beyond Microsoft's, with approvals in front of anything outbound.
- You are an individual or a small team and do not want to buy an enterprise suite to get one capability.
Using both
They are not mutually exclusive, and in practice the split tends to fall along sensitivity. Copilot handles the everyday work inside the Microsoft estate; Convira handles the documents that arrive from outside it and the material that is not allowed to be uploaded anywhere. Convira also connects to Outlook, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint among its connectors on Pro and higher plans, so the two can meet in the middle.
Common questions
Does Convira work with Microsoft 365 files?
Yes. Word, Excel and PowerPoint files are the core of what it does, and it edits them in place on your disk. It also connects to Outlook, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint through its connector catalog on Pro and higher plans.
How do people sign in, and how are teams managed?
There is no password to steal: people sign in with a passkey, Continue with Google, Continue with GitHub, or a one-time code sent to their email. Team plans add owner, admin, operator and viewer roles, per-member credit caps and a credit-usage audit log.
Can a team share one Private Box?
Yes, on the Team and Enterprise plans. Ultra includes a self-hosted Private Box too, but Ultra is a single-user plan. A Private Box runs far larger open models than a laptop can - frontier-scale releases like Qwen3 235B and DeepSeek V3.2 - on a machine you control on your own network. When you add teammates, a teammate with Manage settings seals each member's own key to that member's device key, and Convira relays and stores only that ciphertext. The box's own transport credential travels only to another settings manager, sealed the same way, because only a settings manager can reseal for the rest.
Convira facts on this page come from How it works, Security and Pricing, and are the same ones published there. If anything about Microsoft 365 Copilot is out of date or unfair, tell us at support@convira.ai and we will correct it.