Rovo vs Copilot vs ChatGPT: Cost at 50-500 Seats

A thread on the Atlassian Community starts with an admin whose company had rolled out the Jira Cloud connector for Microsoft 365 Copilot: "Some users can't access/ask about work items that they have access to in Jira via Copilot; they get "this item does not exist" or "I don't have access to this data" responses." I keep coming back to that line when people ask me about Rovo vs Copilot, because it isn't about price at all. What matters is how the assistant gets at your Jira and Confluence data. Each of the three does it differently.

So here's my take, with the money first. If you pay for Jira and Confluence Standard or above, Rovo comes with them and has no seat price. Microsoft 365 Copilot is a per-person add-on at $18 to $30 a month. ChatGPT Business is $20. OpenAI doesn't publish a ChatGPT Enterprise price at all.

Rovo still costs money, though. From 3 December 2026 Atlassian charges $0.01 per credit once your team goes over its pool, and extra usage is on by default. And if you buy ChatGPT and point it at Jira through Atlassian's MCP server, some of those calls draw from the same pool. You can end up paying a seat price and the Rovo meter for the same question.

The prices below come from the vendors' own pages, read on 26 October 2026. The Rovo numbers come from our own test org. We hold no Copilot licence and no ChatGPT Enterprise licence. So nothing here measures how good their answers are. By Copilot I mean Microsoft 365 Copilot throughout. GitHub Copilot, the coding assistant, isn't part of this comparison.

What we found: Rovo stays cheaper until one person uses about 2,150 credits a month

1. There's a break-even, and it's high. On Jira Standard + Confluence Standard a person has to use about 2,150 Rovo credits a month before Rovo costs as much as a $21 Copilot Business seat. That's about 28 Think deeper runs at our measured average.
2. Heavy Rovo use gets close to a ChatGPT seat. One Quick answer and one Think deeper run per working day comes to $17.46 a person a month over the Standard pool. ChatGPT Business is $20.
3. 300 seats is the last size Copilot Business covers. Licensing all 300 is $75,600 a year at list. The same 300 people on the $30 add-on would be $108,000.
4. Copilot costs less inside a bundle. Microsoft 365 Business Premium with Copilot is $32 a user, $10 more than Business Premium alone, while the separate Copilot Business add-on is $21.
5. ChatGPT's Jira questions can show up on your Rovo meter. At one question per working day and Atlassian's 10 to 25 credits for a typical prompt, that's at most 210 to 525 credits per person a month.
6. The Rovo meter disagrees with itself. On 26 October at about 09:20 UTC its Usage tab said 447 credits and its Features tab added up to 487, 9% apart on the same screen.
7. Microsoft's Jira connector treats issue security as optional. Its docs list issue-level security as an optional permission, and the connector doesn't support the "Any user logged in" role.
8. The cheap Rovo answer can miss a field. On a test project, a 10-credit Quick answer said no open item had a due date, while 12 of 15 had one. The 62-credit Think deeper answer used the dates, and every figure in it checked out. That's one run of each.

Rovo vs Copilot vs ChatGPT Enterprise: cost per seat at 50, 200 and 500 users

All prices are USD list on annual billing unless the row says monthly. Rovo's seat price is $0 on these plans. The Rovo rows are the credits above the pool.

Option	Per seat per month	50 seats, per year	200 seats, per year	500 seats, per year
Rovo, light use over the Jira Std + Confluence Std pool	$1.60	$960	$3,840	$9,600
Rovo, routine use over the Jira Std + Confluence Std pool	$3.11	$1,866	$7,464	$18,660
Rovo, heavy use over the Jira Std + Confluence Std pool	$17.46	$10,476	$41,904	$104,760
Rovo, routine use over the Jira Prem + Confluence Prem pool	$2.21	$1,326	$5,304	$13,260
Rovo, routine use over the Teamwork Collection Std pool	$1.11	$666	$2,664	$6,660
Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, list	$21.00	$12,600	$50,400	not sold above 300
Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, promo, first year	$18.00	$10,800	$43,200	not sold above 300
Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, monthly billing	$25.20	$15,120	$60,480	not sold above 300
Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on (enterprise plans)	$30.00	$18,000	$72,000	$180,000
ChatGPT Business Standard, annual	$20.00	$12,000	$48,000	$120,000
ChatGPT Business Standard, monthly	$25.00	$15,000	$60,000	$150,000
ChatGPT Enterprise	not published	quote	quote	quote

The Copilot and ChatGPT rows are on top of what you already pay Atlassian. Copilot also needs a Microsoft 365 plan underneath it. The Rovo rows use three usage profiles built from our own measured unit costs (a Quick answer is 10 credits, our Think deeper runs averaged 75.5) over a 21-working-day month. Light is one Quick answer per working day, 21 × 10 = 210 credits a person a month. Routine adds two Think deeper runs, 210 + 2 × 75.5 = 361, the profile from our 2027 budget for 50, 200 and 500 seats. Heavy is one Quick answer and one Think deeper run per working day, 21 × 85.5 = 1,795.5, which I've rounded to 1,796. Each row is the profile minus the pool, times $0.01, so routine use on Standard is (361 − 50) × $0.01 = $3.11 a seat a month. They have no cap unless you set a limit.

Run the same sum backwards and you get a break-even. A $21 Copilot Business seat buys 2,100 credits of Rovo overage. Add the 50 in the Standard pool and a person has to use 2,150 credits a month before Rovo costs as much. That's about 28 Think deeper runs at our 75.5 average, or seven runs the size of our biggest 310-credit one. Against ChatGPT Business at $20 the break-even is 2,050 credits, and against the $30 add-on it's 3,050. Our heavy profile stays under all three.

A 300-seat company sits right on the Copilot Business limit. Licensing all 300 is $75,600 a year at the $21 list price, against $72,000 on ChatGPT Business and $11,196 of routine Rovo use. Past 300 users Microsoft points you to its enterprise options. The same 300 people on the $30 add-on would cost $108,000. Price both if you expect to grow.

Copilot and ChatGPT are bought per person, so you don't have to license all 200. Say you buy Copilot for 30 people who live in Outlook and Teams. That's $7,560 a year at the $21 list price, about the same as routine Rovo use for 200 people. Rovo comes with the paid Jira or Confluence seats. The pool is shared.

What Rovo costs when you already pay for Jira and Confluence

Atlassian's Rovo licensing page says it plainly: "If your organization has at least one of these paid Cloud plans, Rovo will be automatically added to eligible sites as part of the rollout, no separate Rovo purchase is required." It covers the Standard plan and up of Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Management, and the Service and Teamwork Collections. Atlassian's one published per-seat price is for Rovo Dev, a separate coding agent at $20 per developer a month. Some comparison sites quote that as Rovo's price. You don't need it for Rovo Search, Chat or agents.

What you get is a monthly credit allowance per paid user, pooled across your whole organization: 25, 70 and 150 credits per user per month on Jira and Confluence Standard, Premium and Enterprise, and 250, 700 and 1,500 on the collections. Atlassian's own example is "A Premium customer with 100 users on both Jira and Confluence receives 7,000 (Jira) + 7,000 (Confluence) = 14,000 Rovo credits/month in their shared pool." Unused credits don't roll over.

Above the pool you pay "$0.01 per credit over your allowance ($10.00 per 1,000 credits)", and Atlassian's usage-based pricing page says billing for most meters starts on 3 December 2026. Extra usage is on "for most organizations" by default. Rovo Search stays free, and so do in-line summaries. If you'd like a ceiling before December, our tutorial on how to set or turn off Rovo extra usage walks through the screens.

On our test org, a few long runs used most of the credits

We exported the Rovo credits usage file from our own test org on 20 October. It covers 39 events from 8 September to 20 October and 1,625 credits in total, 826 in September and 799 in October up to the 20th.

Rovo Chat was 19 of those events and 1,435 of the credits. Eleven events cost exactly 10 credits. The other 8 cost 65, 77, 78, 86, 203, 238, 268 and 310, and together they're 92.3% of the Rovo Chat total. Three of the big ones came within 12 minutes of each other on 11 September. The file has no column for the chat mode or the prompt. So the mode behind the 203-310 runs is unknown. Our Rovo credits per user measurement has the single-action numbers (a Quick answer is 10 credits, our two Think deeper runs were 65 and 86). Our Jira Service Management self-service agent ran 15 times at 10 credits each, Rovo agents ran 4 times at 10 each, and a Teamwork Graph event cost 0.

The live meter on 26 October, read at about 09:20 UTC, said 447 credits used of a 3,850 allowance, 12%. On the same page at the same minute, the Features tab added up to 487 (Rovo Agents 196, Self Service Agent 150, Rovo Chat 141, Teamwork Graph 0) and so did the Users tab. On 23 October, for our per-user tutorial, the lag went the other way and the total was ahead. Atlassian doesn't document either. If you're budgeting from the meter, expect the tabs to disagree. On 26 October they were 40 credits (9%) apart, and on 23 October 24 credits the other way. The meter also showed a 961-credit monthly average at that read. It doesn't say which months it averages, and neither month in our export comes close (826 and 799), so I don't budget from it.

Half an hour later the tabs disagreed again, and this time the Features and Users tabs were the ones behind. The four test questions in the next section spent 92 credits. About two minutes after the last one, at about 09:50 UTC, Allowance used said 539 (14%) and the monthly average had moved to 966. Credits this period, on the same tab, had moved only from 447 to 467. The Features and Users tabs had picked up only 20 of the 92. Only Allowance used kept up, and that's the number I'd watch.

A seat price is the same every month, and a credit pool isn't. Of the 487 credits on our Users tab at the 09:20 read, one of our two users accounted for 383. On a small team one person running long jobs can use most of the pool.

Ten credits missed the due dates, and 62 credits got them right

On 26 October I asked Rovo Chat four questions on our test org, each in a fresh chat, and read the org meter before and after every one. Before I started, the meter sat still for 7 minutes, so nothing else was spending. The three Quick answers cost exactly 10 credits each. The one Think deeper question cost 62.

Two of the Quick answers were right. Asked about open work in our LZPT test project, Rovo said 81 items open and 4 in progress, and Jira's own search returned the same counts. Asked which Confluence pages mention incidents, it found the one page there is, though the link it gave pointed at a placeholder your-site address instead of our site.

The third one's why this section exists. I asked what's still open in a test project called Mobile card payments (MPAY) and which work item is due first. The Quick answer counted the 15 open items correctly, then said none of them had a due date set. In Jira, 12 of the 15 have one. Only the three epics don't, and the earliest due is MPAY-9, on 29 September.

Then I asked Think deeper to compare MPAY with a second test project, MALR, and tell me which one looks further behind. It took 80 seconds and 12 steps, and it used the dates the Quick answer said weren't there: 7 overdue items in each project, 120 overdue days added together on MPAY against 97 on MALR, and MPAY-9 the most overdue at 27 days. I checked every figure in its table against Jira by hand, and each one held.

That's one run of each, so I wouldn't call it a pattern. It does show you the trade inside the pool, though. If your question depends on dates, the 10-credit answer may skip the field, and the answer that reads it can cost about six times as much.

These runs also check the numbers behind our table. Quick answers held at 10 credits, the same as on 14 and 15 October. Today's Think deeper run cost 62, under the 75.5 average from our two October runs (65 and 86), so if anything the table overstates what Rovo costs you. At 62 the routine profile would be 334 credits, or $2.84 a seat a month over the Standard pool instead of $3.11. I've kept 75.5, because it's the figure our 2027 budget used and one more run doesn't make a new average.

Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing: Business at 50 and 200 seats, the $30 add-on at 500

Microsoft sells two versions on its pricing pages on 26 October 2026. Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is "Originally starting from $21.00 now starting from $18.00" per user per month paid yearly, or $25.20 on a monthly subscription. The footnote matters for anyone budgeting 2027: "This discount offer is available between July 1, 2026, and December 31, 2026. ... An annual commitment is required, and promotional pricing applies to the first year only." Sign in December and your second year is $21.

Business has a ceiling. Microsoft Learn says it "supports up to 300 licensed users per tenant. Organizations with more than 300 users should use Microsoft Copilot licensing options designed for enterprise environments." For a 500-seat company that's the Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on at "$30.00 user/month, paid yearly", and "A separate license for a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan is required." The enterprise page shows only that yearly price. Its Pay monthly button goes straight to sign-up, so there's no separate monthly price to compare.

A few other things are on the same pages. Copilot is included in Microsoft 365 E7, which lists at $99 per user per month. Copilot Chat comes at no extra cost with an eligible Microsoft 365 plan, but Microsoft's own FAQ says it "doesn't integrate with Microsoft 365 apps or organizational content such as files, emails, or chats." Agents built in Copilot Studio are billed on Copilot Credits ($200 a month for a pack of 25,000). They're "No charge" when a licensed Copilot user runs an employee-facing agent under their own identity, but Microsoft's billing rates page says agent flows with other triggers and computer-using agents still spend credits.

The bundles cost less than the add-on plus the base plan. Business Premium is $22 and the Copilot Business add-on is $21, yet "Microsoft 365 Business Premium with Copilot" shows $32. Business Standard with Copilot is $23.50 against $14 plus $21. The page's footnote only says "Offers and discounts may vary between Microsoft 365 plans with Copilot and add-ons." Bought as a bundle, Copilot adds $10 a user on Business Premium and $9.50 on Business Standard, which is $24,000 and $22,800 a year at 200 seats (our arithmetic). On one of those plans? Get the bundle quoted next to the $21 in the table.

Copilot vs ChatGPT Enterprise: the per-user price OpenAI does not publish

OpenAI publishes ChatGPT Business at $20 per user per month billed annually or $25 monthly for a Standard seat, and $100 or $125 for a Premium seat. Its billing help page adds a "2 seat minimum per workspace", and whoever owns the licences should know that "you are charged for all standard and premium seats in your workspace, whether or not they've been assigned".

Set against Copilot, the two published prices are close. ChatGPT Business is $20 a seat and needs no other licence. Copilot Business is $21 ($18 on the promo) on top of a Microsoft 365 plan of $7 to $22, up to 300 users, and above that it's $30 on top of an enterprise plan such as E3 at $39. Counting the base plan, a Copilot seat is $28 to $43 a month on Business and $69 on E3. That's if you don't already pay for the plan.

ChatGPT Enterprise has no public price. The pricing page says "Contact our sales team to discuss enterprise pricing" and "Credit-based and token-based pricing are available for Enterprise plans." The help centre says Enterprise workspaces "purchase a shared credit pool at the contract level" with "no per-seat usage caps by default", and once the pool runs out "advanced features will be paused unless Workspace Owners enable overages". It's the same idea as Rovo's pool, sold on a contract.

What about the actual number? One comparison site, Coworker AI, reports $45 to $75 per seat, about $60 typical, and a minimum of around 150 seats. It also says the widely quoted $60 traces back to a single 2023 Reddit anecdote. I couldn't confirm any of it on an OpenAI page, so it isn't in the table. If ChatGPT Enterprise is on your list, the quote is the number, and the Business price is the floor you can compare it with.

Copilot Jira connector vs ChatGPT's Atlassian connector: what each can read

Rovo reads Jira and Confluence with your own permissions

Rovo sits inside Atlassian. The admin overview on our org says "Rovo respects existing permissions. Users and agents can only access data and take actions that their permissions allow." Atlassian's trust page says "Rovo honors all existing permissions within each feature." There's no index to configure for Jira and Confluence themselves. Those are Atlassian's statements. We haven't tested Rovo against issue security levels on our org, so give it the same restricted-ticket test you'd give Copilot.

Rovo can also pull other tools in. Our connector catalogue listed 39 connectors in 7 groups. Six of them are Microsoft: Entra, SharePoint and OneDrive, Outlook Calendar, Outlook Mail, Teams and Azure DevOps. Atlassian's page says indexed data "stays within Atlassian's infrastructure, and is never processed by external AI models", and that storing indexed objects doesn't use Rovo credits. There's no ChatGPT, OpenAI or Copilot connector in that list. We tested the SharePoint one in our Rovo SharePoint connector piece.

Copilot reads an index Microsoft builds from Jira and Confluence

Microsoft 365 Copilot uses Microsoft's own connectors. The Jira one "supports Jira Cloud-hosted instances only. Jira Server and Jira Data Center versions aren't supported." It indexes "Title, Issue description, Issue status, Project name, Created and updated dates, Assignee name, Priority", and custom fields can be added. You choose who sees the results: "Everyone", or "Only people with access to this data source: Indexed data appears only for users who have access in Jira." It needs Browse projects, while issue-level security is listed as optional, and "The connector doesn't support the Any user logged in application role for granting issue access."

The Confluence connector "honors Confluence's space permissions and page restrictions" and indexes attachments. It leaves out page history, archived pages, drafts and content from third-party Confluence apps. Watch the timing, though: "Permission changes are picked up only during a full crawl (once every 24 hours by default), not during the 15-minute incremental syncs."

The Jira connector has the same lag. Microsoft's deployment guide says "Updates to groups that govern access permissions are synced in full crawls only. Incremental crawls don't support the processing of updates to permissions", and the full crawl runs daily. A reply in the Community thread from the top blamed that lag. The admin answered that it wasn't sync lag: the connector didn't seem to read the permissions in the first place. The thread ends there. No fix. I wouldn't assume issue security levels are honoured until you've tested a restricted ticket and a permission change yourself.

Indexing costs nothing extra on Microsoft 365, per the connector prerequisites. Grounding Copilot answers in connector data needs Copilot licences, though. Without them the content shows up in Microsoft Search only. On writing back, a Microsoft Q&A answer says "write permissions are not supported by the connector."

ChatGPT goes live through the Atlassian MCP server (the Rovo MCP server), and spends your credits

ChatGPT reaches Jira and Confluence through Atlassian's MCP server. Atlassian's support docs now call it the Atlassian MCP server, its launch post called it the Atlassian Rovo MCP Server, and OpenAI lists it as the Atlassian Rovo app. OpenAI's Company Knowledge page says "Company Knowledge respects permissions in the connected source. A member can retrieve only information they are already allowed to access through the app connection." OpenAI's admin page says administrator-managed sync is no longer available, so the Atlassian app works as a live connection through Atlassian's MCP server, which Atlassian's launch post says "uses OAuth authentication and respects all existing permission controls".

I didn't expect this bit: some of those ChatGPT calls come out of your Rovo credits. Atlassian says "Installing and connecting to Rovo MCP Server and Teamwork Graph (TWG) CLI are free. However, enriched API calls into TWG ... consume Rovo credits when they externalize Teamwork Graph context to an agentic, CLI, MCP, API, or other 3P product path." Most are "1-10 Rovo credits per call", and "Typical prompts consume 10-25 Rovo credits total." A Community member who tested it with Claude found that "Just opening a ticket, or searching for tickets — this did not cost any credits", while Teamwork Graph calls cost 0 or 7-10.

To put a number on it, assume each ChatGPT user asks one Jira or Confluence question per working day. Assume each prompt costs Atlassian's typical 10 to 25 credits. That's 21 × 10 = 210 to 21 × 25 = 525 credits per person a month. Say routine Rovo use has already spent the Standard pool. Then 200 ChatGPT users would add $5,040 to $12,600 a year to the Atlassian bill (210 to 525 × $0.01 × 200 × 12). That's an assumption, and an upper bound. Plain ticket opens and searches cost nothing in that Community test.

One Community thread says "Until December 16, 2025, this worked without any configuration" and that the connector "does not provide live access to Jira data from this ChatGPT integration, despite being listed as connected." Another says the links it returns point at api.atlassian.com, and clicking them shows "Issue does not exist or you do not have permission to see it." Atlassian also keeps a support article for write actions failing through the ChatGPT Rovo connector.

There's a reverse route too. Since 26 August 2026 Rovo has been "available as an agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams". That page names no price. But Atlassian's licensing page says a Rovo Chat question from Teams costs the same credits as one in Jira.

On training data the three are close but not identical. Atlassian's LLM partners "operate under strict zero data retention (ZDR) agreements", but Atlassian itself may use de-identified metadata to fine-tune open-source models in its own infrastructure, subject to your data contribution settings. Microsoft says prompts and responses "aren't used to train foundation models", and OpenAI says "We do not train our models on your data by default".

Assumptions, and which AI assistant to buy at each seat band

1. Prices are USD list prices read on the vendors' pages on 26 October 2026, on annual billing unless a row says monthly. No discounts, no reseller margins, no tax.
2. You already pay for Jira Standard + Confluence Standard (or Premium where the row says so). Jira + Confluence Standard on Atlassian's annual tables is $8,450, $30,500 and $64,500 a year at 50, 200 and 500 seats, and it's left out of the table because you need it whichever assistant you pick.
3. Rovo pool: 25 + 25 credits per person per month on Jira Standard + Confluence Standard, 70 + 70 on Premium, 250 on Teamwork Collection Standard. If you pay for only one of Jira or Confluence, the Standard pool is 25, and routine use costs (361 − 25) × $0.01 = $3.36 a seat a month. Overage $0.01 per credit from 3 December 2026.
4. Rovo use, over a 21-working-day month: light is 210 credits per person (one Quick answer per working day at 10 credits), routine is 361 (plus two Think deeper runs at our measured mean of 75.5), heavy is 1,796 (one Quick answer and one Think deeper run per working day). Overage is the profile minus the pool, times $0.01, times seats, times 12.
5. Copilot needs a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan you already pay for (Business Basic $7, Business Standard $14, Business Premium $22, or an enterprise plan such as E3 at $39). That base isn't in the table.
6. Copilot Business is capped at 300 users per tenant, so 500 seats use the $30 add-on.
7. ChatGPT Business needs no other licence. It bills for the seats you bought, assigned or not. ChatGPT Enterprise is priced by OpenAI's sales team, so there's no figure.
8. ChatGPT questions through Atlassian's MCP server aren't in the table. Our estimate above (210 to 525 credits per person a month) assumes one question per working day at 10 to 25 credits.
9. Everyone at the company gets a licence. In real life you'd probably buy Copilot or ChatGPT for a subset.

What I'd buy depends on where your people spend their working day.

50 to 200 seats, mostly working in Jira and Confluence. Start with Rovo, because you already have it. Set an extra-usage limit before 3 December. Then watch the meter for a month. Look at who's running the long jobs, since one heavy user can spend more than everyone else together. Copilot for everyone would cost $12,600 to $50,400 a year at list, for answers about content Rovo can already read.

50 to 200 seats, living in Outlook and Teams. Buy Copilot Business for the people who write documents and mail all day, and maybe not for the rest. If you're buying it anyway, sign before 31 December 2026 for the $18 first-year price and budget $21 for year two. Test the Jira connector with a restricted ticket and a permission change before you promise anyone it sees what Jira shows them.

500 seats. Copilot for everyone is $180,000 a year at $30, against about $18,660 of routine Rovo overage on Standard or $13,260 on Premium in our model. That gap isn't like for like, because a Copilot seat also covers Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook and Word. I'd keep Rovo as the assistant for Jira and Confluence and license Copilot by role. On Premium at this size, the Teamwork Collection maths in our budget article is worth redoing too.

Your people already use ChatGPT. ChatGPT Business at $20 is the published price. For Enterprise, ask the sales team for the credit-pool terms in writing, and set a Rovo limit for the MCP calls.

We only pay for Rovo, so answer quality is the part we haven't measured. I'd love to hear from the other side. If your company already pays for Microsoft 365 Copilot or ChatGPT Enterprise, did anyone point it at Jira, and did it find the tickets Rovo finds? Tell me in the comments under this post. And if you've got a ChatGPT Enterprise quote you're allowed to share as a range, I'll add it to the table.

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Originally published on leanzero.net. More Atlassian, Forge and local-AI write-ups at leanzero.net/blog, and if you're planning a migration or a Forge app, that's what we do: leanzero.net/services.