ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude.
Which one for your business?
Not “which AI is best”, but which makes sense for which kind of business use, and what the security and licensing implications actually are for a North West SME. An honest comparison from an MSP that doesn’t resell any of them on commission.
There is no “best AI tool”. There’s only the right tool for the job.
If a vendor tells you their AI is the best one for your business without asking what your business does, they’re selling, not advising. The honest answer is that ChatGPT, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Claude all do similar things, all do them well most of the time, and all have specific situations where one is the obvious choice and the other two aren’t.
For most North West SMEs, the practical answer in 2026 is to standardise on Microsoft 365 Copilot for work that touches Office documents, and approve one paid business tier of either ChatGPT or Claude for general chat-based AI use. The free tiers of any of them shouldn’t be used for business data, full stop.
Below is a side-by-side look at the three for SME use, not for tech reviewers. Every claim here is something we’d defend in a meeting with your finance director.
How they compare for SME business use.
Three columns. Same criteria for each. No hype.
Microsoft 365 Copilot
The default choice for SMEs already on Microsoft 365.
Cost: £16.10 per user per month on top of an existing M365 Business Premium licence (the right floor for any business taking AI seriously). Total per seat around £33.70 per month at full list price.
Best for: Built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Works with your existing files and emails. Strong on summarising threads, drafting from briefs, building decks from existing content.
Data handling: Strongest of the three. Your data stays inside your Microsoft 365 tenant, isn’t used to train models, and respects existing SharePoint permissions (when those permissions are sensible).
Watch out for: Requires SharePoint and OneDrive to be tidy. Over-permissive folders become Copilot leakage points. Premium pricing for users who don’t actually use it.
ChatGPT Business
Flexible, popular, broad-purpose. Not always the safest.
Cost: Free tier widely used (and unsafe for business data). Plus tier around £20 per user per month for individual subscriptions. Business tier from around £20 to £25 per user per month, with proper data controls.
Best for: General writing, brainstorming, code help, image generation. Strongest brand recognition with staff. Easiest sell internally. Good for ad-hoc tasks that don’t fit into Office.
Data handling: Free tier may use your prompts for training. Plus tier doesn’t, but is a personal subscription. Business tier provides proper enterprise controls but requires central setup. Most SMEs are running a mix of all three.
Watch out for: Shadow AI risk is highest with ChatGPT because it’s the tool staff already know. Without a policy and a paid central subscription, you have no control over what’s being shared.
Claude for Work
Strong on long documents and careful reasoning.
Cost: Free tier exists but limited. Pro tier around £15 per user per month. Team tier with admin controls from around £25 per user per month. Enterprise pricing on request.
Best for: Long documents, contracts, multi-page analysis. Claude has a longer context window than the others, which means it can read and reason about much larger documents in a single conversation. Often preferred by professional services firms.
Data handling: Anthropic doesn’t train on customer business data by default on paid plans. Reasonable enterprise controls available on Team and Enterprise tiers.
Watch out for: Smaller market presence in the UK SME segment, so less likely your team have used it before. Lower brand recognition can mean slower adoption. Not yet integrated into Microsoft Office in the same way Copilot is.
Three real SME scenarios and our pick for each.
The same business may need different tools for different jobs. Here’s how we’d advise three typical SMEs.
The accountancy practice with 25 staff.
Heavy Office and Outlook use. Confidential client data everywhere. The right answer is Microsoft 365 Copilot for partners and senior managers, plus Claude for Work for long-document review (contracts, leases, analysis). Both with proper controls. No free public tools.
The construction firm with 60 staff.
Office staff use M365 heavily. Site staff barely touch it. The right answer is Copilot for the office team only (probably 10 to 15 of the 60), plus a single ChatGPT Business subscription for general use. Site staff get clear “no public AI tools for work” guidance.
The manufacturer reviewing all options.
Smaller team, lighter Office use, technical product documentation. The right answer might be ChatGPT Business across the team and skip Copilot entirely. Or Claude if the technical writing is dense. We’d run a 30-day trial of two before committing.
The choice of AI matters less than how you set it up.
We’ve seen businesses pick the “best” AI tool on paper and waste it. We’ve seen others pick the simpler option and get genuine value within weeks. The difference is rarely the tool. It’s six things that have nothing to do with which logo is on the login screen.
If you want help working through these for your business specifically, that’s exactly what an AI readiness conversation covers. No PDF download, no demo, just a proper conversation about your team and your data.
Two more pieces worth reading with this one.
Tool choice is one decision. The bigger picture lives across the rest of the cluster.
If Copilot looks like the right answer for your business, the deeper guide. Real cost in 2026, prerequisites, the five roles where it pays for itself, and when to wait.
Read the Copilot guide →
Let us tell you which one actually fits your business.
Half an hour on a call, twenty minutes looking at your current setup, and we’ll give you a single-page recommendation with which tool, which tier, and which roles. No commission, no hype, no upsell.